On 2008-08-03, Bob wrote:
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

(remove the X to email)

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!

My oldest machine is an Altair 680b (the Motorola 6800 CPU
instead of the more common Intel 8080 CPU) -- "raised from a kit". Lots
of other machines since, with UltraSPARC machines being the current bach
in service.

[ ... ]

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

[ ... ]

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.

[ ... ]

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.

*And* -- it would probably draw so little power you would never
notice it -- while the Kaypro-II would draw more -- IIRC it had a liner
power supply, so it was heavier and less efficient than a switcher would
be.

Enjoy,
DoN.

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