Adam Osborne and the Osborne 1: The Portable PC That Killed Itself

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In 1981 portable computing meant dragging a plastic box of nearly 25 pounds, the size of a sewing machine, through an airport and shoving it under the seat. It had no battery. The Osborne 1 was the idea of Adam Osborne, a successful author and publisher of computer books who believed price was the barrier keeping ordinary people from computers. He hired Lee Felsenstein to engineer a machine with the screen, two disk drives, keyboard, and motherboard in one rugged case, and sold it for 1,795 dollars.

This episode traces the full arc of that machine, from mockery at its unveiling to sales of 10,000 units a month to bankruptcy by 1983. The secret was software: Osborne bundled programs with a retail value of roughly 1,500 dollars by licensing them in bulk for a few dollars a copy. The undoing was an announcement. Promising a better successor froze sales of the model already filling the warehouses, a mistake business schools now teach as the Osborne effect.

• The bundle included CP/M, WordStar, SuperCalc, CBASIC, and MBASIC, so buyers felt they were purchasing software and getting the hardware almost free.
• The screen showed less than four and a half inches of picture and only 52 characters per line, forcing users to scroll sideways across an 80 column document.
• Osborne insisted on single-sided drives holding 90 kilobytes because he feared head crashes in transit, and an unkeyed internal cable could fry the machine if plugged in upside down.
• Australians Geoff Cohen and Stuart Ritchie built an 80 column add-on, and Ritchie waited outside Osborne's office for two days until he could sell it to the company.
• The Kaypro II arrived with a 9 inch, 80 column screen and double density drives, and Osborne's early preview of the Osborne Executive led dealers to cancel their orders.