competitor Kaypro was selling a computer with a screen for $400 less, and the Kaypro machine had already begun to cut into sales of the Osborne 1, a computer with a screen for $1,995. Consequently, after inventory of the Osborne 1 had been cleared out, McCarthy believed, customers switched to Kaypro, causing monthly sales of the Executive to fall to less than 10% of its predecessor. On 20 June 2005, The Register quoted Osborne's memoirs and interviewed Osborne repairman Charles Eicher to tell a tale of corporate decisions that led to the company's demise. Apparently, while sales of the new model were relatively slow, they were starting to show a profit when a vice president discovered that there was an inventory of fully equipped motherboards for the older models worth $150,000. Rather than discard the motherboards, the vice president sold Osborne leadership on the idea of building them into complete units and selling them. Soon, $2 million was spent to turn the motherboards into completed units, and for CRTs, RAM, floppy disk drives, to restore production and fabricate the molded cases. This was far more money than anybody anticipated, and also more than the company could afford at that time. In his autobiography, Osborne described this as a case of "throwing good money after bad". It was at this time that the company folded. Other examples In 1978, North Star Computers announced a new version of its floppy disk controller with double the capacity which was to be sold at the same price as their existing range. Sales of the existing products plummeted. The company almost went bankrupt, folding in 1984. Other consumer electronic products have been continually plagued by the Osborne effect as well. In the early 1990s, TV sets' sales were depressed by talk of the imminent release of HDTV, which did not actually become widespread for another 10 years. When Sega began publicly discussing their next-generation system (eventually released as the Dreamcast), barely two years after launching the Saturn, it became a self-defeating prophecy. At the time Sega had a history of short-lived consoles, particularly the Sega Mega-CD and 32X, which were considered ill-conceived "stopgaps". Those consoles, along with the early release of the Saturn in the United States to compete with Sony's PlayStation, ended sales of Sega's own Genesis and frustrated players (the early release meant they could not afford the console) and developers (the early