Kaypro

Kaypro was a manufacturer of portable¹ microcomputers running the CP/M OS. Their first model, the Kaypro II, was launched late in 1982 at a price of US$1795, and was built around a 2.5-MHz Zilog Z80 microprocessor—like the portable, CP/M-running Osborne 1 of 1981, Kaypro's source of "inspiration". The time from the close of the door on the floppy drive to complete boot of the operating system with a ready command prompt was about 5-6 seconds for the Kaypro II. The Kaypro II was the first all-metal cased² portable computer, and by mid-1983 Kaypro had dropped the price to $1595 and was selling more than 10,000 units a month. Its success briefly made Kaypro the fifth-largest computer maker in the world.

The Kaypro 2 (differing only in bundled software from the model II) had 64 KB of RAM, and dual, single-sided, 180K 5¼" floppy disk drives. The screen was an 80 column green monochrome 9" CRT. 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 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 Mince (http://www.scrounge.org/unicorn.htm), 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.

Kaypro the company had started life as Non-Linear Systems, a maker of laboratory test equipment, founded in 1952 by Andrew Kay (http://www.kaycomputers.com/andy.html), the inventor of the digital voltmeter. Their computers continued the design aesthetics of their original volt meters. The outer case was constructed of steel² or aluminum. The keyboard covered the screen and disk drives, when clipped on. There was no battery, the computer ran off regular AC mains power. There was a legal dispute with regards to the Kaypro 2 main circuit board being an unlicensed copy or clone of the Bigboard design.

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 as the IBM PC and its clones gained popularity, but was late to market 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, sold an all-in-one portable computer that was similar to its own CP/M portables, only it ran MS-DOS and was nearly 100% IBM compatible. Kaypro held on for several years, eventually filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March 1990. In June 1992, Kaypro filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, and in 1995, its remaining assets were sold for $2.7 million.

Home/personal computer manufacturer Commodore largely modeled the specific capabilities of its Commodore 128 CP/M implementation on the Kaypro computers, so that software would be instantly available for it.

The Kaypro name briefly re-emerged as an online vendor of PCs early in the first decade of the 21st century. The resurgence was short-lived. Andy Kay re-emerged with a second company, called Kay Computers, utilizing a similar sales strategy.

Notes

1. Weighing in at about 20 lb (10 kg), the term luggable has more recently been used to describe it as compared to smaller, more portable computers.
2. The original Kaypro II case was painted aluminum.
3. 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
4. Perhaps an obscure product plug, Peggy Hill uses the "Kaypro" to write her musings on the animated TV series "King of the Hill". It was replaced in a much later episode by what appears to be an iMac.

External links

• Kay Computers (http://www.kaycomputers.com/)
• Kaypro II: pictures and details on oldcomputers.net (http://oldcomputers.net/kayproii.html)
• Kaypro II on Obsolete Computer Museum (http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/kaypro/)
• Kaypro IV & 4 (http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=548)
• Kaypro 10 and 2: pictures and details (http://www.fortunecity.com/marina/reach/435/kpro10.htm)