Today in 1983, the Osborne Computer Corporation introduced The Osborne Executive portable computer, featuring 128KB RAM, a 7-inch amber monitor, a detachable keyboard, and two 204KB 5.25-inch disk drives. Price: $2,495. Weight: 28lb.
The Osborne Executive was the successor to the Osborne 1 which shipped in July 1981, a month before the IBM PC was introduced. 11,000 Osborne 1s were sold over the next eight months, with 50,000 more on backorder, although the early units had a 10% to 15% failure rate. In addition to its relatively attractive cost ($1,795), the Osborne 1 did not require customers to make any hardware or software-related decisions, unlike its competitors. In its fiscal year that ended in February 1983, the company’s revenues reached $100 million.
On September 13, 1983, the Osborne Computer Corporation filed for bankruptcy.
According to proponents of the Osborne effect theory, Adam Osborne damaged his company's sales when he began showing the Osborne Executive to journalists in early 1983. Dealers rapidly started cancelling orders for the Osborne 1 in anticipation of the new Executive. Unsold inventory piled up and despite dramatic price cuts—the Osborne 1 was selling for $1295 in July 1983 and $995 by August—sales never recovered.
Harry McCracken begs to differ:
It’s clear that the theory behind the Osborne Effect–that an otherwise healthy enterprise committed unwitting suicide by preannouncing products–doesn’t stand up. The Osborne 1, so alluring in 1981, looked like an antique by 1983, in part because it had originally aspired, as Adam Osborne had explained, to mere adequacy. If people didn’t find it so tempting anymore, they didn’t have to wait for better Osbornes: They could buy a Kaypro or a Compaq or one of numerous other computers that built on the Osborne 1’s innovations. And many of them did.
Moreover, the product category that Osborne Computer created–CP/M-based luggables–didn’t outlive the company by very long. The booming market for IBM-compatible machines had already left CP/M a dead operating system walking. And “lap-size” computers were getting better at a furious pace. The portable computer of the future wasn’t anything that Osborne had preannounced: It was Toshiba’s T1100, an enormously popular PC-compatible laptop.
The first PC I have ever used, in 1984, was the Osborne Executive (or was it the Osborne 1?). The Osborne was a great improvement over the terminal connected to a VAX minicomputer I used before to manage $2.5 million-worth of survey research budgets at NORC. But soon enough, I abandoned the Osborne for the shiny new IBM PC running Lotus 1-2-3.
What I witnessed was not just the evolution of computing but also a revolution in corporate human relations. As I later wrote in “3 Reasons Why the Future is Not What it Used to Be”:
The most interesting sociological revolution of the office in the 1980s – and one missing from most (all?) accounts of the PC revolution – is what managers did with their new word processing, communicating, calculating machine. They took over some of the “dull” secretarial tasks that no self-respecting manager would deign to perform before the 1980s… No manager would type before the 1980s because it was perceived as work that was not commensurate with his status. Many managers started to type in the 1980s because now they could do it with a new “cool” tool, the PC, which conferred on them the leading-edge, high-status image of this new technology. What mattered was that you were important enough to have one of these cool things, not that you performed with it tasks that were considered beneath you just a few years before.