Adam Osborne dies

Adam Osborne has died. He was an early columnist for personal computer magazines, book author and publisher, and founder of Osborne Computer. Dan Bricklin has a remembrance of Osborne including an audio recording. [Source: Scripting News] There is also a NYT obituary by John Markoff.

This takes me back. I had one of the Osborne ‘portable’ computers, and I loved it, even if I wound up with one arm longer than the other from lugging it about. It resembled a cross between a fancy sewing machine and a Korean War army communications console. But it came with Wordstar, the first decent word-processing program I’d ever used, and I wrote hundreds of thousands of words with it. The downside was that its twin disk drives were terribly unreliable, so I was never sure that it wasn’t about to trash my data. As coincidence would have it, one of my colleagues brought in his old Osborne portable yesterday and booted it up. It worked. Ah, those were the days! If you hang on a moment, I’ll tell you about the battle of Omdurman.