Chris Null has written a great article about the early history of portable PCs for Mobile PC magazine.
Inspired by the IBM 5100 and Xerox's Notetaker — a 48-pound machine with a keyboard that folded over the display — Osborne's eponymous computer was cobbled together from the cheapest parts he could find. The Osborne 1 hit the market at $1,795, with dual floppy drives and a 5-inch CRT. Flip the keyboard over the front, latch it on, and your 24.5-pound computer was ready to go wherever you needed it. Osborne had amazing success with the product, but it was fatally crushed by the birth of Compaq in 1983, which copied the Osborne carefully while adding one killer feature: IBM compatibility.
UPDATE: Stefan says: "I actually worked on an Osborne in the early '80s. The college SF club
had one. We used it to lay out the schedule and generate individually
numbered tickets for our SF convention. I recall using the included
BASIC to create a program that would generate a Superbowl betting grid.
"One of the big selling points for the Osborne was the software. The
company pioneered the concept of bundling. In addition to the CP/M
operating system, you got WordStar, a spreadsheet, a flat-file database
program and so on. It even had a nice app for reading and writing
PC-format disks.
"The computer itself was, frankly, a piece of shit. The monitor was 52
columns wide; when your typing reached the end of a line the display
shifted left. It was terribly susceptible to static shock. You learned
to save your work every few minutes in dry weather, because resets and
lockups were a regular occurrence."
UPDATE: Our own David Pescovitz wrote an excellent piece about the Osborne for Salon back in 1999.
UPDATE: AHM says "As long as we're waxing nostalgic, it may be worth noting that the
Trenton Computer Fest is happening
on April 16-17, 2005. This year, TCF celebrates it's 30th year(!)
by moving back to The College of New Jersey (formerly Trenton State
College) and with a demonstration of a number of vintage computers,
courtesy of the members of MARCH (Mid-Atlantic Retro-Computing
Hobbyists). Who knows, you might even see a working Osborne there."
