Kaypro II

Kaypro Corporation was an American home and personal computer manufacturer based in Solana Beach, California, in the 1980s. The company was founded by Non-Linear Systems (NLS) to compete with the popular Osborne 1 portable microcomputer. Kaypro produced a line of rugged, luggable CP/M-based computers sold with an extensive software bundle which supplanted its competitors and quickly became one of the top-selling personal computer lines of the early 1980s.

Kaypro was exceptionally loyal to its original customer base but slow to adapt to the changing computer market and the advent of IBM PC compatible technology. It faded from the mainstream before the end of the decade and was eventually forced into bankruptcy in 1992.

History

Kaypro began as Non-Linear Systems (NLS), a maker of electronic test equipment, founded in 1952 by Andrew Kay, the inventor of the digital voltmeter.

In the 1970s, NLS was an early adopter of microprocessor technology, which enhanced the flexibility of products such as production-line test sets. In 1981, Non-Linear Systems began designing a personal computer, called ''KayComp'', that would compete with the popular Osborne 1 luggable microcomputer. In 1982, Non-Linear Systems organized Kaypro Corporation as a daughter company. The company stated at the April 1982 West Coast Computer Faire that it had 20 dealers, would not use its existing test-equipment distributors, received $50,000 in orders every day, and expected to start shipping the computer on 20 May.

The first Kaypro model to be released commercially was branded as the ''Kaypro II''; at the time, one of the most popular microcomputers was the Apple II. The Kaypro II was designed to be portable like the Osborne, contained in a single enclosure with a handle for carrying. Set in an aluminum case, with a keyboard that snapped onto the front, covering the 9" CRT display and drives, it weighed and was equipped with a Zilog Z80 microprocessor, 64 kilobytes of RAM, and two 5¼-inch double-density single-sided floppy disk drives. It ran Digital Research, Digital Research, Inc.'s CP/M operating system, the industry standard for 8-bit computers with 8080 or Z80 CPUs, and sold for about .

The company advertised the Kaypro II as "the computer that sells for ". Although some of the press mocked its design—one magazine described Kaypro as "producing computers packaged in tin cans"—others raved about its value, noting that the included software bundle had a retail value over by itself, and by mid-1983 the company was selling more than 10,000 units a month, briefly making it the fifth-largest computer maker in the world.

The Kaypro II was part of a new generation of consumer-friendly personal computers that were designed to appeal to novice users who wanted to perform basic productivity on a machine that was relatively easy to set up and use. It managed to correct most of the Osborne 1's deficiencies: the screen was larger and showed more characters at once, the floppy drives stored over twice as much data, and it was better-built and more reliable.

Computers such as the Kaypro II were widely referred to as "appliance" or "turnkey" machines; they offered little in the way of expandability or features that would interest hackers or electronics hobbyists and were mainly characterized by their affordable price and a collection of bundled software. While it was easy to obtain and use new software with the Kaypro II—there were thousands of application programs available for CP/M, and every Kaypro 8-bit computer had a full 64 KB of RAM, enough to run virtually any CP/M program—the hardware expandability of this computer was nearly nonexistent. The Kaypro II had no expansion slots or system bus connector, no spare ROM socket, no peripheral bus, only two I/O ports, and an ASCII text-only green-on-black video display, of 80 x 24 characters, that could only be shown on the internal 9" CRT monitor (despite the video being scanned at NTSC TV-compatible rates).

In contrast, one feature that was favorable to electronics hobbyists was that all the chips on the Kaypro II mainboard were installed in sockets, not soldered to the board, making it easy to repair the machines or even to splice custom circuits into the stock logic (temporarily or permanently). Also, while Kaypro machines were generally not upgradeable without factory-unauthorized custom modification, some Kaypro computers that came with single-sided floppy disk drives could be upgraded to double-sided drives, and some that came with only one floppy drive could have a second drive added. (The Kaypro II itself was upgradeable, or not, to double-sided drives depending on which of two possible mainboard types was installed in the machine).

Despite their limitations, the boxy units were so popular that they spawned a network of hobbyist user groups across the United States that provided local support for Kaypro products; the company worked with the user groups and would have a salesman drop by if in the area.

Kaypro's success contributed to the eventual failure of the Osborne Computer Corporation

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