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The Osborne: a huggable, luggable

The Osborne looked like a portable Singer sewing machine. It weighed 24 pounds, had two disk drives and a little five-inch, 52-character display, but Anchordesk's Patrick Houston loved it.
Written by Patrick Houston, Contributor
The 20-year birthday bash for the IBM PC in Silicon Valley on Wednesday night brought together many of the founding fathers of the personal computing revolution: Gates, Grove, Moore, Ozzie, Bricklin, Canion. There they were, slicing filet mignon and salmon, shoulder to shoulder with the observers who gave witness to this remarkable era--journalists like David Coursey and me.

It was a rare privilege. And I don't know whether it's hyperbole to say that the opportunity resembled a chance sit down with Jefferson, Adams, Hancock, Franklin, and Washington to commemorate the momentous events of 1776. After all, have the creators of the personal computer wrought any less change than the maverick colonists did?

During the dinner's ensuing panel discussion, we got some delicious anecdotes. One of them: IBM's biggest PC breakthroughs came via the sharing of the machine's technical specifications--something that just wasn't done at the time. But IBM did, in the form of a purple book--a technical reference manual that contributed to the rise of the PC industry.

Being there took me back, too. I wasn't present when the first rays of light broke on the personal computer era. But I was around during the morning. I was an early adopter--a distinction, however dubious, that makes a larger point relevant to what we still need and want by way of computing today.

Let me tell you about my pre-PCs. The first of these was my father's old portable Royal typewriter. The keys were exceptionally lithe, and it was remarkably light for a mechanical device made of metal. My father got it because he wanted to be a journalist. But instead, in those days, his calling was the steel mills near Pittsburgh.

But my fascination must have been bred in my bones. Eventually, I achieved my father's ambition: I became a journalist. During a stint as a reporter in West (by God) Virginia, I got to taste the efficiency of writing via word processing through an Atex publishing system that resided on at least a couple of Digital Equipment minicomputers at the Huntington Herald-Dispatch.

In 1980, I became a correspondent for Business Week magazine, and, believe it or not, I was forced to retreat to using a manual typewriter again. I hated it. As far as writing goes, I'm a tradesman, and I'm very particular about my tools. If I don't feel right, I don't write right.

It was out of this need that I discovered a new kind of personal computer. It was a machine that would enable me to word process once again so that I could easily craft and re-craft, as I'm still wont to do. Plus, it offered the added bonus of being luggable--the world's first portable.

It was an Osborne 1, created by Adam Osborne, a Thai-born Brit who achieved success during the 1970s, first as a writer and then as publisher of computer books.

The Osborne looked like a portable Singer sewing machine when it was cased up. It weighed 24 pounds. It had two disk drives and a little five-inch, 52-character display. What's more, it was the very first computer to come packaged with software, including WordStar, SuperCalc, and BASIC. It cost me a whopping $1,795--about the same price you'd pay today for the kind of cutting-edge system the Osborne was then.

It had its limitations. The screen was hard to see. It toted like a bag of rocks. But anything--anything--was better than a typewriter. I remember hauling it off to a cabin in Pennsylvania's Laurel Highlands to complete a freelance magazine feature--about a quadriplegic who was being enabled by an Apple that allowed him to do things like change TV channels via voice recognition. The story won a prize.

The Osborne was something of a hit, too. By one account, the company racked up second-year sales of $70 million. But then, Osborne made a strategic mistake: He announced the development of a successor, while he still had plenty of existing product in the pipelines. Sales dried up, as people awaited the new machine. Plus, Apple and IBM were asserting a crush. In 1983, in what was to become a preview of the dot-bomb era, Osborne declared bankruptcy.

As I think back on it, I still haven't gotten over my first computer. It gave me my first taste of being able to write away from the office. I'm still yearning for that freedom.

I have a light laptop, but I'm eagerly awaiting the high-speed wireless networks of tomorrow, so I can write my columns from the beach at Big Sur, the red desert of Sedona, or the high cranberry glades of the West Virginia mountaintops.

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