Osbourne Executive (fwd)

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(a)unix.aardvarkol.com -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Amiga enthusiast and collector of early, classic microcomputers