Requiem For a Pioneer

But given Osborne's notoriety and gift for invention, it didn't take long for me to find out who he was and what he had done. It took even less time to discover the incredible impact this man and his company had on our industry more than 20 years ago. And I'm writing now to say thank you. We throw the phrase "ahead of its time" around like the most hackneyed phrases in our lexicon, but perhaps no man and no technology was more ahead of its time than Osborne and his namesake invention: the Osborne 1, the first portable computer the world had ever seen.

Warren Mills, CEO of Advantiv, a software company based in Phoenix, used to work for Xerox Stores 22 years ago and recalls how Osborne Computer exploded on to the scene in 1981. "We couldn't get enough of the Osborne 1's at our stores," Mills says. "It was like the dot-com era in the early '80s. People made a ton of money off the Osborne 1; there was just so much excitement around it."

In the IT industry, few events stand out as much as that April day at the West Coast Computer Fair in 1981 when an unknown company unveiled the Osborne 1. Imagine that: a trade show that offered a truly compelling and innovative product. Remember, too, that IBM launched its first PC five months later, a date which is widely -- and inaccurately -- regarded as the birth of the PC.

For computer lovers that year, the Osborne 1 was something out of a dream. Remarkably low-priced at $1,795, the portable unit weighed between 23 lbs. and 27 lbs., depending on the model, and featured a fold-out keyboard, a small 5-inch black-and-green screen, dual floppy disk drives with 102K of storage each, and a 4-MHz Z80A CPU with 64K of memory. The packaged software, which was a novelty 22 years ago, included a CP/M operating system, Wordstar word processing program and SuperCalc spreadsheet software, along with CBASIC and MBASIC programming languages.

The Osborne 1 is credited among high-tech circles for ushering in the era of affordable personal computing and packaging a software suite with the computer. "It was ugly, clunky and heavy, but it didn't matter," Mills remembers. "The reality was that it put quality software in people's hands in an affordable computer for the first time. It was fascinating."

A truly viable commercial desktop had barely even seen the light of day in 1981, and here was a former chemical engineer and technology manual author bursting into the industry and shaking it to its very core. Just a year earlier, following the sale of his publishing company to McGraw-Hill, Osborne approached computer engineer Lee Felsenstein (who designed the Pennywhistle 103 kit modem and the Sol-20 computer in the mid-'70s) and proposed the idea of a portable personal computer.

The two got together with venture capitalist Jack Melchor, and in 1981, Osborne Computer officially got its start, quickly blazing a trail like no other company before it. Before they knew it, the founders of Osborne Computer were selling 10,000 units a month; they hit $1 million in sales within six months. It's as close to an overnight success story as anything we've ever seen in this industry.

"I believe the impact was so pervasive that it's hard to discern," Felsenstein says. "It moved the industry beyond the market of enthusiastic individuals packaging their own systems to a mass market with standardized, complete, one-size-fits-all products including software."

Not So Fast

In essence, Osborne Computer made computing personal and accessible. Second year sales reached a remarkable $70 million. But just when it seemed Osborne Computer was on a fast track to be the next IBM, everything came apart. In 1983, the company struggled to release new versions of the portable computer, and as delays piled up, sales of the Osborne 1 fell hard.

Then, a start-up named Compaq broke into the market in 1983 and captured Osborne Computer's momentum by introducing both its own version of IBM's PC and a portable model as well. Apple and IBM were soon beating on the start-up's door as well. That same year, Osborne Computer declared bankruptcy and shut its doors for good.

Osborne's vision, however, would have a lasting effect. The Osborne-1's explosive sales and popularity brought computers to the mainstream in 1981. It's no surprise that the following year, Time magazine ditched its "Man of the Year" award for "Machine of the Year," which of course was the computer. And in 1984, Apple Computer's legendary Super Bowl television commercial for the Macintosh would air, and things were never the same.

It's often said that true pioneers never realize their visions -- that being the first to do something or create something, especially in this industry, comes with a massive burden. Others always follow the pioneer, and later overshadow the leader by sidestepping the mistakes and errors that explorers and inventors inevitably make. We need not look far to see evidence of the many stellar inventions shaping our world today that were created not by the technology leaders we know but by great minds before them. If the era of the personal computer can be seen as a relay race, then Osborne Computer was the first runner -- charged with the awesome responsibility of leading, but doomed to never see the finish line.

Nevertheless, the era had begun in earnest in 1981, and there was no turning back. Osborne Computer would never be able see the fruition of the revolution it started just as, sadly, Adam Osborne himself won't see the continuation of this grand revolution for the next decade or two. But other computer makers continued the movement that began at the historic West Coast Computer Fair in 1981.

The rest isn't just history. It's a legacy.