Kaypro

~ the obit ~

Andrew Kay had been building digital voltmeters in Solana Beach, California for thirty years before his company made a computer. Non-Linear Systems had a factory and a sales network. What it did not have was any obvious reason to walk into a market Apple and Tandy had already opened. It walked in anyway, in 1982, and the machine it carried was the Kaypro II.

There was never a Kaypro I. The number started at two so the thing would look like a successor to something. What you took home was an aluminum case weighing about 26 pounds with the keyboard latched over the front like a lid, a nine inch green screen, a Z80, 64 KB of memory and two floppy drives. It cost $1,795. The Osborne 1 it was aimed at had a five inch display, and that single comparison sold an enormous number of Kaypros.

The actual trick was inside the box rather than around it. Kaypro bundled the Perfect Software suite and a BASIC that compiled to real CP/M programs, and the advertised retail value of that software came to more than the price of the computer carrying it. By the middle of 1983 the company had gone public and was shipping over ten thousand machines a month, which briefly made it the fifth largest computer maker in the world.

None of this is mine to remember. The Kaypro II was already discontinued before I could read, and the company was in Chapter 7 six years before I first heard a modem negotiate. What survives the distance is the shape of the offer: a computer sold as a finished answer, with everything you were going to need already paid for. The industry spent the next forty years taking that apart and selling it back one subscription at a time.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what you actually got for the money ~

CP/M was the operating system, so a Kaypro ran the same business software as every other serious desk machine of the era. The screen gave you 24 lines of 80 characters, which was exactly what a terminal gave you, so text arrived already the right shape and stayed that way. The case was metal rather than plastic and it survived being thrown into the back of a car, which mattered to the salespeople and accountants who bought most of them.

The Kaypro 10 followed in 1983 with a 10 MB hard disk built in. Almost nobody was putting a hard disk in a machine at that price, and for a short window Kaypro was selling the cheapest way to stop swapping floppies.

~ the cracks ~

IBM shipped the PC in 1981 and the clone market grew up behind it fast. Kaypro kept selling CP/M machines to customers who already owned CP/M software, which was the loyal decision and the wrong one. Its first IBM compatible arrived late and did not sell. By the time the product line was properly PC based, the buyers who once paid a premium for a metal case were buying whatever was cheapest and beige.

~ the actual end ~

The company stayed under family control while the market moved out from under it. Revenue slid through the back half of the decade. Kaypro filed Chapter 11 in March 1990 and spent two years trying to reorganize before converting to Chapter 7 in June 1992. What was left of the assets went for $2.7 million in 1995.

The name reappeared in 1999 on an online PC vendor and was gone again by 2001, which has nothing to do with the machine. The machines are the part that lasted. A Kaypro II with a working drive still boots today, because there is nothing inside it that depends on a server somewhere agreeing to answer.

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