May 24
Adam Osborne
I had an early interest in computers , My first awareness of Adam was through his book on microcomputers.
It is Ironic that one of the points he made was how just a few of them would meet the needs of humanity. Stoplight controllers and some industrial automation.
Fast forward to the Early 80's Osborne Computer corporation. and the Osborne 1 and the Executive... I Purchased an Osborne Executive portable computer
Two floppy drives CP/m 2.2 and a 5 inch screen, it had a parallel port for printing and a serial port for comunication.
I joined the FOG First Osborne Group in the San Francisco area.
I met Adam at several of the meetings where he would come and speak / promote / mentor his users.
Adam was a tall man with a mustache and a British like accent, Later I found out he was a person who had spent a lot of time in India under the British influence..
I appreciated him because he took the time to engage with me and answer some questions I had about Computers as a career.
I was contemplating shifting my focus from "Industrial control electrical engineering to a more software and business focus. I was looking for some angle or reassurance that there was a future in computing.His advice was sound."If you can make software that helps someone else make or save money then do get at it. But make sure you get paid"
Well Hyper growth was his next book and it chronicled the rise and fall of OCC, A very interesting book with more lessons on business..
Fast forward I was at Lawrence LAb in the late 80's early 90's and I was doing some programming for a few customers and some at work on th efire alarm testing system. Programming in Dbase and other variants including clipper and foxbase , I was also volunteering for caritable groups from the Nuclear freeze to Amnesty International. I was building a multi platform database program for building mailing lists from collected information A single Floppy disk program you could insert into many different CP/M computers and do data entry.
For Amnesty international I was doing the monthly newsletter on Ventura Publisher on a PC.
This is where I met Adam again, he was a member of the Local amnesty group. We met at our local meetings (Church facility on college and Dwight in Berkeley) and I was able to spend more time chatting with him.
He talked about bringing a pseudo internet / compute capability to small towns and villages in India. These were inexpensive low power shared computers in central areas or facilities in the Indian towns.
The Internet was in very early stages and the poverty level made a computer inaccessible to most people .
The last time we spoke he was on his way to Spend more time in India.
Not a close friend but an influential one who I appreciated and respected.
