garius

Yup. I'll be covering OS/2 when I look at operating systems in this period.

The level of foot-shooting by IBM on that one was ridiculous.

keyboard wasn't great either, to begin with!

I did try and find out if it was. Sadly couldn't find anything to confirm it!

Yup.

Downside of how much tech has changed is stuff gets missed in a copy edit because the numbers sound so silly (to modern ears) they assume I haven't screwed up a typo or find/replace.

I'll flag it.

You have a 4?! I'm jealous!

Yeah, I think like everything their issue (with hindsight) was mostly that they needed to be faster on the changes across the board to survive.

I don't really blame them for missing that window. It was so small to begin with thanks to IBM.

I'll be covering IBM and Don Estridge next.

Something I didn't have space to mention in the piece was that during the recession of the early eighties, Vector went out of their way to support their dealer network.

They offered loans and let dealers delay payments on deliveries to get them through the tough times.

It arguably cost them ground against IBM because it squeezed them further financially. But it was also another reason the Dealer network remained fiercely loyal to Vector - especially under Harp.

Rest assured Steve is very much on my long-list!

If Every commission 'season two' of this series, then I'll likely focus on figures from the software side of Silicon Valley. Steve makes that list in a heartbeat.

Reading that back in the day was one of the reasons she was on my list for this series to write about. Was the first time I'd heard of her!

(Love your ongoing blog and output)

Yeah - one thing that didn't make the edit unfortunately was a few paragraphs on this. They'll make the book chapter though, when I write that.

It was one reason I wanted to tackle Osborne first in the series - because Vector did, quite legitimately, Osborne Effect themselves with the 4. Which absolutely didn't help.

I only mention it briefly in the piece, but Osborne were already working on an IBM compatible machine (codenamed the 'Wayne') when the company went under. It wasn't one of the things Osborne himself managed to retain the rights to. He kept the 'Vixen' design and eventually released a variant of that to limited success.

As usual, Osborne had spotted the direction of travel and was preparing to adapt to it through IBM Compatibility. But by that point the company (and R&D within it) was such a mess that the Wayne wasn't very far advanced.

Wouldn't surprise me if some minor elements from its development ended up in future Compaq machines - or at least were used to cross-check their own work - but not much.

It's really complex.

I get into it as much as I can at the end, but the Osborne Effect absolutely plays a part. It's just not in the way that got press at the time (i.e. the Executive being announced too early).

Basically Adam repeatedly triggered mini-Osborne Effects, with product variants. None of which should have been enough to take the company down. But bad financial management had killed the company's runway, they'd exhausted funding from their VC backers, and they had no ability to raise covering loans from banks until they could IPO.

So what should have been a minor ripple in their finances ended up just taking the whole company down.

I honestly think, based on my research, that if they'd managed to secure the IPO - having sorted out their accounts first - then they'd have survived the IBM PC-clone transition. They were already pivoting to deal with it.

They just ran out of time.

I mean, I'm LITERALLY here. And I wrote it.

I talk about sources in the piece. I own Osborne's books. The only picture in it is one that's credited to me, a photo of my personal copy of Hypergrowth. I have done interviews with people who knew him. I quote a number of people who did. I've spent many years trawling old issues of Byte, Infoworld and more on this era (because a lot of this stuff outside of the common Apple/Microsoft narrative is obscure or badly covered in modern books - if at all).

But sure. Maybe I'm a robot and just don't know.

Yes. As I cover in the piece, it's Felsenstein he singled out to physically design it. The two men knew each other from Homebrew and Osborne collared him at the West Coast Computer Faire, bringing him onboard for a share of the company and a basic subsistence salary until they could ship.

So at this time, Gates actually has a DOS deal in place with Lore Harp over at Vector Graphic - one he'll renege on when IBM come knocking.

That'll come up in the next piece, as I'll be looking at Lore and the Vector 1.

But yes. Agreed. His real rise to dominance won't occur until the IBM PC explosion.

I write this column and I'm not a robot.

Although I'll admit I haven't Voight-Kampff tested myself recently.