Kaypro |
Kaypro was an early home computer manufacturer of the 1980 s. Made popular by its striking line of rugged portable (often termed, Luggable ) CP/M based computers, it faded from the mainstream by the late 1980 s.
=Company History=
Kaypro started life as Non-Linear Systems , a maker of laboratory test equipment, founded in 1952 by Andrew Kay, the inventor of the digital voltmeter (see Voltmeter). A respected electronics equipment producer, Non-Linear Systems started a daughter company named Kaypro in 1982 and began work on producing a computer designed to compete with the popular Osborne 1 portable microcomputer.
Their first product, the Kaypro II was designed to be portable like the Osborne. Set in an aluminum case, it weighed in at 29 pounds and was equipped with a Zilog Z80 microprocessor, 64 Kilobytes of RAM, and two 5.25 inch double density floppy disk drives. It ran on Digital Research CP/M operating system and sold for about $1,795.00.
By mid-1983 Kaypro had dropped the price to $1595 and was selling more than 10,000 units a month. Its success, due in part briefly made Kaypro the fifth-largest computer maker in the world and spawned a computer magazine for Kaypro computer users entitled Profiles. It also helped bring about the eventual failure of the Osborne Computer Corporation.
From the release of the Kaypro II, Kaypro moved on to produce a long line of similar computers well into the mid 80 s. Exceedingly loyal to its orginal core group of customers, most of their computers ran on the CP/M operating system, though towards the mid to late 1980 s, somewhat behind the market trend, they began producing IBM clones. The slow start into the IBM clone market would have serious ramifications.
After several turbulent years, with sales dwindling, Kaypro filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March 1990. Despite restructuring, the company was unable to recover and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in June 1992. In 1995, its remaining assets were sold for $2.7 million.
The Kaypro name briefly re-emerged as an online vendor of PCs in 1999, but was discontinued in 2005 by its parent company [http://www.premiopc.com/ Premio Computers Inc.] due to sluggish sales.
Kaypro founder Andy Kay re-emerged from the final failure of Kaypro with a second company, called Kay Computers, utilizing a similar sales strategy.
=Kaypro Computers=
Kaypro s first computer, the Kaypro 2 (differing only in bundled software from the model II) had 64 kilobyte of Random Access Memory, and dual, single-sided, 180 KB 5¼ floppy disk drives. The screen was an 80 column green screen monochrome 9 cathode ray tube.
The outer case was constructed of steel or aluminum. The computer keyboard covered the display device and disk drives, when clipped on. There was no battery (electricity), the computer ran off regular Alternating current mains power.
There was a legal dispute with regards to the Kaypro 2 main circuit board being an unlicensed copy or clone (computer science) of the Bigboard design.
CP/M was the standard operating system of the day, and the machine also came with applications such as the WordStar word processor (including MailMerge, for personalised mass mailings), the SuperCalc spreadsheet, two versions of the Microsoft BASIC interpreter, Kaypro s own compiled S-BASIC (which produced executable .com files), a bytecode-compiled BASIC programming language called C-Basic, and the dBaseII relational database system.
These well-known titles were a replacement for the initial offering that came with the Kaypro II, which included an office suite of PerfectWriter, PerfectCalc, PerfectFiler, and PerfectSpeller, as well as Kaypro s S-BASIC. PerfectFiler featured non-relational, single-table databases suitable for merging one s contact list with form letters created in PerfectWriter. The key commands for PerfectWriter were based on [http://www.scrounge.org/unicorn.htm Mince], which was based on Emacs. Later on MBasic (a variant of Microsoft Basic) was added to the model II suite of software.
Using the comma-separated values (CSV) file format you could move data between these programs quite easily, which multiplied the utility of the package. The manuals assumed no computer background, the programs were straightforward to use, and thus it was usual to find the CEO of a small company or somebody else developing the applications needed in-house.
The Kaypro II also came with some games, some of which were ported versions of old character-based games from earlier days (e.g., Star Trek), and a few of which were arcade games re-imagined in ASCII, including a Pac-Man-like game (in which the player character was the letter C alternating between lower- and upper-case to create the chomping action) and a Donkey Kong-like game (in which the player character was a lowercase p or q depending on directional heading, or a lowercase b or d after a precipitous fall).
All this software when bought separately would cost more than the whole package including the Kaypro 2, which was a very usable and (at the time) powerful computer for the office and the laboratory. This made the Kaypro very popular, both at work and with well educated professionals also at home – even though the metal casing made it look more of a laboratory instrument than a home/office appliance.
The Kaypro IV and later the Kaypro 4 had two double-sided disks .
The Kaypro 10 followed the Kaypro 2, and featured a 10 megabyte hard drive and a single 5¼ floppy drive.
Kaypro followed with MS-DOS-based computers in the Kaypro 16, Kaypro Robie and others, as the IBM PC and its clones gained popularity. Kaypro was late into the market, however, and never gained the kind of prominence in the MS-DOS arena that it had enjoyed with CP/M. Instead, Kaypro watched as a new company Compaq, stole its market share with the Compaq Portable, an all-in-one portable computer that was similar to Kaypro s own CP/M portables with the exception that it ran MS-DOS and was nearly 100% IBM compatible.
This and other corporate issues helped lead to Kaypro s eventual downfall.
=Kaypro by Model & Year=
Kaypro s nomenclature was odd, with the numerical designations for their machines having more to do with the capacity of the drives than the order they were produced. Kaypro also released several different models with the same names, perhaps hoping to capitalize on the name recognition of their older machines. As a result, identifying exactly which model a Kaypro is often requires an inspection of their hardware configuration.
All of the computers listed below are of the portable type unless otherwise noted.
: Kaypro 10 - The Kaypro 10 was one of the earliest computers to come standard with a Hard Drive. It came with a 10 megabyte internal hard drive and a single DS/DD floppy drive.
: Kaypro Robie - The Kaypro Robie was the only CP/M based Kaypro to be non-portable. Designed as a desktop coputer, it had the same motherboard as the Kaypro 4. It was also equipped with two 2.6 Mb high density floppy drives and a 300 Baud modem. The Robie did not sell well.
: Kaypro New 2 - A scaled down Kaypro 2X for the budget buyer, came with minimal software, and did not feature the internal modem.
: Kaypro 4+88 - A dual system computer, the 4+88 was equipped with both an 8088 processor and a Z80, and was capable of running both the MS-DOS and CP/M operating systems. It came with 256 KB of RAM for the MS-DOS operating system that could double as a RAM disk for CP/M.
: Kaypro 16 - Very similar in appearance to the Kaypro 10, the Kaypro s 16 s main difference was that it had an 8088 processor and 256 KM of RAM and ran on the MS-DOS operating system instead of CP/M.
: Kaypro 2000 - Kaypro s first and only laptop, the Kaypro 2000 was an MS-DOS machine that ran on heavy lead-acid batteries. Strikingly similar in basic appearance to a modern laptop, it featured a detachable keyboard and brushed aluminum casing and a pop-up 3.5 inch floppy drive.
: Kaypro PC - Late on the PC market, the Kaypro PC was intended as a competitor to the IBM PC-XT desktop machine. Running at a faster clock speed than IBM s machine, it was available with a larger hard drive than that offered by IBM and an extensive software package.
=Notable Kaypros=
=Notes=
# Weighing in at about 20 pound (10 kilogram), the term luggable has more recently been used to describe it as compared to smaller, more portable computers. # The original Kaypro II case was painted aluminum. # The Kaypro 4 was released in 1984, usually referred to as Kaypro 4 84, as opposed to the Kaypro IV released one year earlier and referred to as Kaypro IV 83
=See also=
=External links=
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