Adam Osborne Retrospective on ABCNews.com

From Dana Baggett, A retrospective on Adam Osborne. Who was he? Just the inventor of the first portable PC. In this special report for ABCNEWS.com, Michael S. Malone recalls what it was like in the frantic days of the early '80s:

There has never been anything quite like it. No other era in tech history has produced, side by side, a figures as unforgettable as the Mozartian Wozniak, Auschwitz survivor Jack Tramiel (Commodore) and slick media mogul Steve Ross (Atari). It was weird, weird, weird — and I'm speaking as someone who grew up in the middle of it. Looking back, I still can't quite believe it actually happened.

And in this crazy industry, nobody was more compelling, outrageous, and infuriating than Adam Osborne. Just imagine: in a world containing Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, Osborne, it was agreed, had by far the biggest ego.

Osborne is also infamous for his major marketing goof of introducing a future new model before it was ready to ship and killing sales of current models in stock. That is now known as the "Osborne Effect" in the marketing world.