Here's a message I recieved last year after the aquisition of my Osborne
Executive that I thought some of you might find interesting:
*** Forwarded message, originally written by Arthur N. Borg on 14-Aug-96 ***
Dear Jeff,
At the time that the Osbourne was being designed, I worked for the company
that made the display. I remember clearly asking one of the Osbourne engineers
what
he thought about the IBM PC that had recently been introduced. He said, that
computer has a color display, It is just a toy or video game. Ours is a
business
computer.
The Osbourne executive ran CP/M 3.0 as the operating system. If you have an
operating system disk and a format and modem disk. You should have access to
everything that you need. Walnut Creek has a CD-ROM with more CP/M material
than
you could imagine.
I (think) that I have a set of manuals but I also (think) that they are in
storage in the United States. One caveat. In the manual there is a drawing
showing
how to connect the parallel port to a Centronics printer. The drawing is
totally
incorrect. I spent a week re-wiring the dongle so that the printer would work.
The
Osbourne Executive has two unusual features. First, the printer port is alsso
a
bi-directional IEE-488 interface and so the machine could control and monitor
lab
equipment and so on. Also, the type face is loaded into ram at start up and
so, you
can devise your own type face or use Greek or whatever.
We also made some of the displays for the Osbourne 1 and having a 63
character display was very limiting. Fitting 80 characters on a 7 inch display
was
not easy. You will note if you have a full screen of characters, as you turn
the
machine around, the earth's magnetic field tends to make the outer characters
slip
out of view. Osbourne was roundly condemned for announcing this machine too
early
and killing sales for the Osbourne 1 and thus killing the company. I think
that
this is a harsh judgement. This was the time that FCC radiation rules were
just
getting started and everyone was having a hard time meeting them. In plain
fact, I
think that they didn't realize how big a task they had to pass this test. I
saw
some figures after the company died. There was no week that they were in
business
that the company had a positive cash flow. You could see from the curves that
somewhere out in the future, they would have a positive cash flow. I think
that the
investors just felt that there was too much going for IBM and pulled the plug
on
Osbourne.
Best regards,
Art Borg
***End of forwarded message
Jeff jeffh_at_unix.aardvarkol.com
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Amiga enthusiast and collector of early, classic microcomputers
Received on Sun Jun 15 1997 - 02:32:29 BST