The luggables notebook
The Osborne was portable, but not conveniently so. Heck, it was a suitcase!
Imagine hauling the 24-pound Osborne across Chicago’s O’Hare airport? Worse: Imagine the joy of your fellow seatmates as you try to wedge the thing beneath the seat in front you.
Despite the inconvenience, the computer world recognized the value of portability. And despite the print ads showing carefree people toting the Osborne around — people with arms of equal length, no less — no hip marketing term could mask the ungainly nature of the Osborne: Portable? Transportable? Wispy? Like it or not, the computer industry itself devised the unglamorous term luggable to describe that type of computer The luggables were an extremely popular class of computer. Never mind the weight. Never mind that most never ventured from the desktop that they were set up on, luggables were the best the computer industry could offer in the arena of portable computing.
The problem with the Osborne was not that it was a luggable. No, what killed the Osborne was that the world wanted IBM PC compatibility. The Osborne lacked that. Instead, an upstart Texas company called Compaq introduced luggability to the IBM world with the Compaq 1, The Compaq 1, introduced in 1983 at $3,590, proved that you could have your IBM compatibility and eat it on the road — or anywhere there was a power socket handy.
But yet, the power cord can stretch only so far. It became painfully obvious that for a computer to be truly portable — as Adam Osborne intended — it was going to have to lose that power cord.