Farewell to a pioneer
: The man who truly invented mobile computing, Adam Osborne, has died. Jimmy Gutterman told me on his weblog. Here is Osborne’s obit.
I still have my Osborne 1 and I’m damned proud of it. Ugly, beige, heavy, with a tiny screen, two clacking disc drives, and CPM, it was expensive at $1,795 (my printer cost even more) but amazing. I carried it around and used it to first connect to online services (at 300 baud, my children) and learn the wonders of connectivity. I wrote a very bad and never published first novel on it.
I took it out the other day and my son — who at 11 speaks PHP already — was entranced by its primitiveness.
Osborne got supplanted by Kaypro and in turn by Compaq and now Sony. But he was a pioneer with a vision.
He made us mobile.
