On Aug 2, 7:19*pm, cavelamb himself wrote:
Tom Gardner wrote:
"cavelamb himself" wrote in message
...

Anybody near Dallas have a working Kaypro II for sale?

--

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.

--

Richard

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Why not just take advantage of one of the myriad microprocessors
designed expressly for control purposes? Even a Basic Stamp is
perfectly adequate for many uses. And the code development can be
done on your windows or linux pc. Advantages are you get support,
modern devices and interfaces, and probably just as cheap as an
antique machine from the dawn of microcomputing.

Bob