Osborne Computer Corporation
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Osborne Computer Corporation Stock Certificate
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| Industry | Computer Hardware |
|---|---|
| Fate | Bankrupt |
| Successor | Mikrolog Ltd |
| Founded | 1980 |
| Defunct | 1985 |
| Headquarters |
Silicon Valley, San Francisco Bay Area, California |
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Key people
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Adam Osborne, Lee Felsenstein |
| Products |
Osborne 1, Osborne Executive, Osborne Vixen, Osborne PC |
The Osborne Computer Corporation (OCC) was a pioneering maker of portable computers. It was located in the early period of the Silicon Valley in the southern San Francisco Bay Area of California.
Adam Osborne the founder of the company, developed, with design work from Lee Felsenstein, the world's first portable computer in 1981.
After Adam Osborne sold his computer book-publishing company to McGraw-Hill in 1979, he decided to sell an inexpensive portable computer with bundled software and hired Lee Felsenstein to design it. The resulting Osborne 1 featured a 5 inch (127 mm) 52-column display, two floppy-disk drives, a Z80 microprocessor, 64 KB of RAM, and could fit under an airplane seat. It could survive being accidentally dropped and included a bundled software package that included the CP/M operating system, the BASIC programming language, the WordStar word processing package, and the SuperCalc spreadsheet program. Osborne obtained the software in part by offering stock in the new Osborne Computer Corporation, which he founded in January 1981. For example, MicroPro International received 75,000 shares and $4.60 for each copy of WordStar Osborne distributed with his computers.
Unlike other startup companies, Osborne Computer Corporation's first product was ready soon after its founding. The first Osborne 1 shipped in July 1981, and its low price set market expectations for bundled hardware and software packages for several years to come. The company sold 11,000 Osborne 1s in the eight months following its July 1981 debut, with 50,000 more on backorder, although the early units had a 10 to 15% failure rate. The peak sales per month for it over the course of the product lifetime was 10,000 units, despite the initial business plan for the computer predicting a total of only 10,000 units sold over the entire product lifecycle. Osborne had difficulty meeting demand, and the company grew from two employees, Osborne and Felsenstein, to 3,000 people and $73 million in revenue in 12 months. The growth was so rapid that, in one case, an executive who returned from a one-week trade show had to search two buildings to find her relocated staff. The company announced in October 1982 a temporary bundling of Ashton-Tate's dBase II, increasing demand so much that production reached 500 units a day and severely diminishing quality control.
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