The Rise and Fall of Adam Osborne
every.to
every.to
I think this is a correct way to put it, but FWIW on HN: the person who actually designed the device (not just the hardware) was the legendary Lee Felsenstein. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Felsenstein
It had previously been reported (and exposed here) that the "Osborne effect" wasn't what killed the company, but (IIRC) quality issues with parts (floppy drive?) that delayed the Executive. Regardless, essentially the fall of the Osborne Computer Corp. is the age old story of a company growing faster than its organization and eventually collapsing.
I get into it as much as I can at the end, but the Osborne Effect absolutely plays a part. It's just not in the way that got press at the time (i.e. the Executive being announced too early).
Basically Adam repeatedly triggered mini-Osborne Effects, with product variants. None of which should have been enough to take the company down. But bad financial management had killed the company's runway, they'd exhausted funding from their VC backers, and they had no ability to raise covering loans from banks until they could IPO.
So what should have been a minor ripple in their finances ended up just taking the whole company down.
I honestly think, based on my research, that if they'd managed to secure the IPO - having sorted out their accounts first - then they'd have survived the IBM PC-clone transition. They were already pivoting to deal with it.
They just ran out of time.
If I charge more I can keep my warehouses from emptying out. If a whale customer really needs a replacement, I've got one to spare instead of making them wait two weeks. I have ways to bribe critical path employees to show up (everything from good food to comping babysitting costs or buying them replacement tickets so they can stay and fix an issue). I can hire more people and be pickier about their initial skill level. And I can get experts (paid or from vendors) to come tell me what I'm doing wrong.
Vendors who think you have more money to spend or will take away the money you're already spending are often willing to throw you a little extra attention to keep you on the hook. That can be better rates, better maintenance, or a couple hours' worth of advice from one of their greybeards who has set up fifty other companies that work a bit like yours.
I'm fascinated that anyone has the time and resources to write articles like this and get paid somehow?
I had/still have an Osbourne 1 and would occasionally lug it from home to work. At almost 25 lbs it was a workout. 10 minute walk to the Seabus and then another almost 10 min walk to the office in downtown Vancouver.
I implemented a threaded interpreter [0] on it where the source was spread over 3 floppies. To assemble it I ran the 3 floppies through a small basic program that stripped all the comments out wrote it to a single floppy.
In the office it was occasionally referred to as 'the nose burn' since the 5" screen was rather small and some had to get close to the screen to read it.
It was sufficient to write resumes for myself and a sibling.
[0] https://sinclairql.speccy.org/archivo/docs/books/Threaded_in...
I like the unifying theory of needing both the waves of publicity to succeed, as well as building a functional well-run business at the same time.
An interesting thing about the design was that it had a 5” screen, but it could only show about 50 columns at a time of the 80 column display. There was a knob you turned to pan the display.
In the end I think the Kaypro was a much better execution of the idea, even with its sharp cornered, steel, shin smashing design.
I certainly did enjoy his books however.
On mine it's keyboard ctl-left/right arrow. Paint is worn off the metal surround as a result. I don't recall a knob.
Turbo Pascal 1.0 for CP/M-80 came out very shortly thereafter, and as a guy who'd previously used UCSD Pascal on PDP-11 and Apple Pascal on the Apple II (which was just UCSD Pascal), I was in heaven. Great machine; I remember it very fondly.
Why Commodore is left out of history is a mystery...
And in 2024, Apple's PR budget is a lot bigger than Commodore's.
> VIC 20 was the best selling computer at the time
So subject for anti-monopoly investigation.
At that time already happen ATT case, GE case. So IBM, Intel and all other big companies tried to establish semi-rival, like AMD for Intel in 1980s, or to make things look like total freedom (IBM PC, lot of S/360 clones).
Commodore was not successful in making semi-free market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._AT%26T
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._General_Elect....
> So subject for anti-monopoly investigation.
No, it wasn't.
If you have a clarification, make it instead of breaking the site rules with insults.
EDIT: I see you've made the suggestion of anti-trust issues in another comment too, and there's simply absolutely no basis for that. At the time Commodore reached its highest ever revenue it wasn't even close to even half the market, much less any position where theyd be at risk of antitrust, and Atari, which you also implicated elsewhere was a near bankrupt non-entity (soon to be bought by Tramiel for a pittance), and that was the largest Commodore ever got.
I just wanted to tackle Adam first as he had a more personal relationship with Jobs.
Didn't know about the Compaq point, although I remember reading about the Compaq portable.
As usual, Osborne had spotted the direction of travel and was preparing to adapt to it through IBM Compatibility. But by that point the company (and R&D within it) was such a mess that the Wayne wasn't very far advanced.
Wouldn't surprise me if some minor elements from its development ended up in future Compaq machines - or at least were used to cross-check their own work - but not much.
[1] https://commodore.international/2021/12/21/cp-m-for-the-comm... and https://www.pagetable.com/?p=1312
That'll come up in the next piece, as I'll be looking at Lore and the Vector 1.
But yes. Agreed. His real rise to dominance won't occur until the IBM PC explosion.
(I almost wrote "Osborne-1" but conveniently there is an Osborne 1 sticker on my desk and I happened to glance at it!)
In 1977, the "trinity" of dominant home computers was the Commodore PET, Apple II, and TRS-80, and Microsoft was a tiny startup.
Microsoft didn't enter the OS space until 1980 - before that they sold and licensed BASIC interpreters, and they were small enough that Commodore/Tramiel infamously managed to buy a fixed price (single payment) license that they hung onto for many years to avoid having to negotiate a new deal for newer versions. They got in the region of $50k or something like that.
In 1980 they licensed Unix and launched Xenix. It was first in 1981 PC DOS/MS DOS made its appearance. At that point they had only 100 employees. By 1983, Microsofts revenue finally reached $55 million.
In 1981 Commodore saw an explosion in their unit sales with the VIC-20, while Apple milked far higher revenue per unit instead.
For comparison to MS $55m in 1983, Commodore had revenues of $125 million in 1980, $186 million in 1981 and $681 million in 1983, before reaching its all time peak of $1.2bn in 1984 (they exceeded $1bn again once more in 1990)
Apple had $118 million in revenue in 1980 and $1.51B in 1984.
It was first towards the end of the 1980's that Microsoft became dominant.