And don't forget the Kaypro

A couple of you responded to my Osborne memoir with some sweet reminisces about the Kaypro... to wit:

*****
From Wesley:

Ah -- the memories...

My first computer was a Kaypro 4-84.

It was awesome.

Not only was I able to write a complete screenplay on it, but the two 5.25
disks held a whopping 390K!!

Not only was it highly functional with the incredible display, but I could
even PLAY the text only games that were just coming out. You remember --
open the door; pick up the axe; kill the spouse, et cetera.

Standard features:

NAME
Kaypro 4

MANUFACTURER
Kaypro

TYPE
Transportable

ORIGIN
U.S.A.

YEAR
1984

END OF PRODUCTION
1985

KEYBOARD
Full-stroke keyboard with arrow keys and separated keypad

CPU
Z80A

SPEED
4 Mhz

COPROCESSOR
Motorola 6845 (video controler)

RAM
64 KB

VRAM
2 KB

ROM
2 KB

TEXT MODES
80 chars x 25 lines

GRAPHIC MODES
virtual 160 x 100 through graphical characters

COLORS
built-in 9'' monochrome monitor

SOUND
No sound

SIZE / WEIGHT
46 (W) x 41.5 (D) x 21.5 (H) cm / 15kg

I/O PORTS
2 serial ports, 1 parallel port, communication socket (built-in modem)

BUILT IN MEDIA
two 5.25'' DS/DD half-height floppy drives (390 kb)

OS
CP/M 2.2

POWER SUPPLY
Built-in power supply unit

PRICE
About $3500

You'll note -- the price was only $3500.00!!

Boy did I get a deal!

************

And from Ethlie...

Loved the reminder re: the computers we were using a minute ago. I was just thinking whether I should bother to upload a 64K GIF file onto eBay. 64K? That's so tiny! Why even bother?

Mine was a Kaypro with a single floppy drive, so you had to pull out the program disk in order to save the text you were creating. The screen glowed amber -- it was that or green -- and the dot-matrix printer (the size of my spare desk) printed only capital letters. Wordstar commands were often a character typed in the first column, so if you had a sentence that began with, say, the letter L, it would suddenly become an indented sub-paragraph, whether you wanted it to or not.

Those were the days.

My new phone has actual voice recognition. I was about to re-record all those sound bites of me saying "John" and "Mary" for the phonebook, but they explained that all I have to do is say "Call John" or "Call Mary," and the phone will look to see if it has J-O-H-N or M-A-R-Y in its list.

I don't know what it's going to do with my entry for BMW. How do you pronounce that?

Have a gorgeous day - eav