When was it made & what kind of hardware specs did it have?
Heh. ‘Blazing Fast 4mhz CPU’.
http://oldcomputers.net/kayproii.html
Kaypro II was the most popular one it seems.
Notice that Kaypro 1 was released last!
Even in the late 80’s the public college had Kaypros and I learned Basic in one of them, and with CPM!
Some specs over here:
The Kaypro II was the first computer my family owned. My mother got it in 1982 or '83 for her home business. (Mom is pretty cool.) It had no hard disk, only two 195K 5.25-inch floppy drives: you put the program disk in drive 1 and the data disk in drive 2. The operating system was CP-M.
At college a couple of years later I rented one to write my senior essay. I was the only one in the college with a computer. All my fellow students were really impressed!
In 1984 Mom upgraded to the Kaypro 10, which had a 10 MB (not GB!) hard disk. After those 195K floppies, we thought 10 MB was like infinity! We couldn’t imagine ever filling up 10 MB. And that Winchester drive (which is what we called them then) was fast!
Before the Internet, I connected to Bulletin Board Systems with a Kaypro II. At a blazing 300 baud. (Is that really bits per second?) When we got the the 1200 Baud modem, it was like ‘Stuff downloads faster than you can read it! Amazing!’.
Kaypro had a couple entertaining arcade games where all the graphics were letters – your character was a “b” or “d” depending on which direction you were moving… you jumped over "o"s, etc. Good times.
It also had Wordstar ™ powerful word processing.
And the laptop only weighed sixteen pounds or so.
I had a Kaypro II–in fact I liked it so much I had two of them. One is still in my basement, and possibly functional.
Loved the games. We had one called “Ladder” and one that mimicked PacMan. I think it was called “Catchum.” We played these games enthusiastically. If you won at Catchum, which some of us eventually did, you got the message, “Hey, Dog Breath, you broke the game!”
I remember that transition, too. 300 was easy, 1200 was just a bit faster than comfortable. 9600 was the big time.
$1795.
Absolutely amazing that you can buy a far better machine today for the price of what would be considered a boat anchor today!
Yes, but an IBM PC of the era (with no hard disk and data storage on audio cassette!) was, IIRC, about $5,000, and an Apple II was about $2,500. And neither of them was portable.
And even though there was little or no graphics capabilty, programs written in that era were tight and relatively speedy (except when they had to access the floppy, which they avoided for that reason). For stuff like basic word processing they ran just about as well as today’s bloatware, although with far fewer bells and whistles, obviously.
I’m not saying I want to go back, but today’s programmers could take some lessons from those early days.
Okay, I should have thought check the oldcomputers.net site before posting my last post. Here are the correct details: The first IBM PC was $3,000, and the Apple III (not II) was $3800 with a monitor.
Slight hijack: I remember in the late 1980s when IBM proudly announced they were fabricating 1 MB memory chips. This was back when you had to put extra memory on cards loaded with 16K memory chips in an expansion slot and then use all sorts of kludgy software tricks to get DOS to recognize anything over 640K. And half the programs couldn’t access it anyway.
The price back then for 1 MB of RAM (1 MB, mind you, not 1 GB!) was $1,000. I shit you not.
Now you can get a terabyte of RAM for a couple hundred bucks.
<hijack/nitpick>
Baud is not the same as bits per second. Baud is the method of organizing and encoding data to be transmitted in such a way that more than a single bit can be encoded in one transmitted symbol. For the most part, as they pertain to us old school BBSers calling ordinary bulletin boards it’s roughly equivalent most of the time (in a practical sense, it ended up being about 27 or 28 bytes per second) so most people used BPS and Baud interchangeably, but it was entirely possible with some modems to have higher BPS rates transmitted at lower Baud rates.
</hijack/nitpick>
OMG, I just noticed on the Apple II page that memory was much more expensive in the late 1970s. The price list for the Apple II:
Apple II Price List (June 1977)
RAM
4K…$ 1,298.00
8K…1,398.00
12K…1,498.00
16K…1,698.00
20K…1,778.00
24K…1,878.00
32K…2,158.00
36K…2,258.00
48K…2,638.00
Upgrading from 4K to 48K (44K of RAM) cost $1,340!!!
It gets more shocking when you adjust for inflation. $1340 in 1977 is about $4000 in 2005. Even you don’t accept the consumer price index as a good indicator for high-tech goods, consider an engineering graduate starting salary in 2005 at somewhere around $40-$50,000 while his 1977 counterpart might get $15-20,000. A month’s salary gets you 44kb in 1977, and a wicked Pentium dual-core with 200GB SATA drive, 20" flat screen, and 2GB of RAM in 2005.
Thank you fighting my ignorance. I wasn’t sure, so I framed it as a parenthetical question, thanks again for taking the time to answer it.
In 1984, I bought the first MS-DOS compatible laptop, the Data General One. I had almost all the attachments and upgrades: 256k RAM, dual 3.5 floppy drives, 300 baud modem, external 5.25 floppy drive, AC adaptor/battery charger and the spiffy matching computer bag. Paid just over $5,000 for it. It’s still in storage.
Dude, “Ladder”! I remember that! It would throw out vicious taunts such as, “You eat quiche!”
Posting from 10 years in the future is not allowed on these boards. You can get a gigabyte of RAM for less than $200 but stacking 1024 of those sticks together costs a lot more and it is hard to find a motherboard big enough to hold all of them.
Curses! My secret is out! Never mind. Just look at this pen-like device for a second.
FLASH
Commasense is not a super-intelligent pan-dimensional being from the future, just an ordinary Doper like the rest of you. (Well, a little more intelligent than most of you.)
Sorry, it was a typo. I meant megabyte.