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cavelamb himself[_4_] cavelamb himself[_4_] is offline
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Default OT - Want to buy Kaypro II computer.

Tom Gardner wrote:
"cavelamb himself" wrote in message
...

Anybody near Dallas have a working Kaypro II for sale?

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Richard

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I have a couple home-brew Xerox 820 with Z-80, SSSD 8" FDD, 256k daughter board,
linear power supply, running CP/M. Nothing in cases, motherboards were bought
bare and populated with a soldering iron. Bunches of text adventures,
Wordstar, Visi-calc and more. Work fine!



Cool.
Is that 256k daughterboard from SWP?

I have a motley collection of old boards too.
Kapro II, SWP Z80, Big Board, and a 2 meg Co-power (unpopulated
unfortunately). And a fair collection of single board trainers.

What I'd prefer is a working K-II with the full height floppy bays.

I thought I'd set the WayBack for a kinder gentler time in computer
history - one where one could actually do I/O for control applications.

On a modern Windows machine that's almost impossible.
Sure, you can write a DLL for I/O, but the timing jitter makes it pretty
useless.

Way Back then, before being dragged kicking and screaming into the IBM
world, I had 6 or 8 Kaypros in stock. My personal machine, the one I
bought brand new, was humming along at 10 Mhz, had 2 floppies and a
10 meg hard drive, a Copower II co-processor for ram disk and/or MSDOS,
a Z80 printer buffer (256k) and a color display driver for an external
TV.

I've been tinkering with a "modern" CP/M machine fro the 21st Century.

Current technology would produce:

50 Mhz Z80 (!) 2 Gig ram, 800x600 VGA display, USB port for pen drives.
Drive A (user programs) cast in ROM (virus proof!).

The whole thing looks like it would fit in a bumb on the back of a flat
panel LCD display.

And - yes, it can do I/O... Like machine control stuff.


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Richard

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