The Passing of Adam Osborne, and His Brief Stay in the Pick Community
Jonathan E. Sisk 

 

Adam Osborne, a pioneer in the computer industry, died yesterday at the age of 64.

In CNN's words: "Adam Osborne, who co-founded a company that pioneered portable computers but met the same fate of countless future Silicon Valley firms that grew too quickly, has died. He was 64".

Sometime between 1990 and '91, I had the opportunity to spend the better part of a weekend with him, which coincides with his entire career as Vice President of Engineering at Pick Systems.

Pick Systems, for anyone who may not know, was a closely held company formed and held by the iconoclastic Dick Pick, who died in October,1994. The company was bought out of Probate Court in 2000 by a Venture Capital group based in Portland who subsequently did a reverse merger with another of their public companies, and renamed the new company Raining Data Corporation (Nasdaq: RDTA).

As the sole remaining living person involved in Adams brief stay at Pick, I felt it was my duty to publish this bit of trivia, mainly for the historians.

One Friday night, Dick called me at home and told me he had a special project for me. I was familiar with Dicks' Special Ops, and knew they were usually good for a laugh and paycheck, so I quickly signed on.

Somehow, Dick and Adam had crossed paths and had the chance to do some bonding. Dick had decided, from phone conversations alone, to hire Adam as the next new VP of Engineering of Pick Systems. He was to report to his new job in Irvine, California the following Monday morning.

Dick told me that Adam wanted to "play with the software on his PC", meaning, he wanted me to walk Adam through the installation and a crash training course over the weekend so he would have an idea of what the Pick Database was all about when he arrived.

AP/DOS (Advanced Pick over DOS) was fairly new to the PC at the time, and its installation procedure was about as simple as changing the batteries on the Hubble Space Telescope. I managed to courier a copy of the software to Adam, along with the copious installation guide notes, which at the time consisted of 4 or 5 single-spaced pages of individual tweaks one needed to make. He had those and a copy of AP/DOS in his hands first thing Saturday morning. AP/DOS was the first version to run "under" DOS, rather than in its "native" implementation, where it completely replaced DOS and ran in stand-alone mode.

I spent the next 14 hours or so on the phone with Adam, methodically slogging through the installation procedure.

Along the way, we had plenty of time to talk, and I found him to be a congenial, curious and open person. When I felt comfortable enough with him to ask what happened at Osborne Computers, he simply said that "the accountants ripped him off". Too bad that message didn't get out before Enron. He didn't volunteer any of the other details mentioned in the CNN article.

By midnight Saturday night, we had not completed the installation but had completed our energy level, and agreed to resume the following morning.

Sunday morning, he called. While details are a bit fuzzy here, I think we managed to get the software up and running, and managed to get him logged on to the SYSPROG (admin) account, where he was unceremoniously presented with a TCL prompt - Picks' equivalent of the DOS prompt.

A sense of dread came over me when he spoke the next two words: "Now what?".

"Now you build your accounts and files, define your dictionaries, and write applications in Pick/BASIC to populate the files with data". I knew this answer well, having spent the bulk of my professional career teaching and writing about the Pick database.

To say that Adam was unhappy would be an understatement. I'm not entirely sure now what he expected, but perhaps even having a demo would have possibly mitigated the tirade he unleashed on me. He ended by telling me to get a message to Dick: "Tell him that if he does not call me today, I am not coming in tomorrow."

Not all Special Operations missions are successful. Even when the goal is achieved, the outcome may not be what was expected.

Dick was not the greatest person at taking Bad News. I was not one who liked delivering it, but it was my duty to relay the message to Dick, who went ballistic. To keep this article from being blacklisted by Bad Word filters, I will not publish the rest of what Dick said. I also have to guess that Dick never made the call, as I never heard from or about Adam until reading his obituary this morning.

So there it is. I'm not sure who else even knew besides me that Adam Osborne was VP of Pick Systems for nearly a whole weekend.

 

Jonathan E. Sisk
On the digital coast of Southern California
March 25, 2003