On May 20, 1982, Kaypro shipped its very successful Kaypro II computer, a portable computer that ran CP/M and its associated software. Its main innovation was bundling a selection of popular software with the computer and selling the bundle for less than the combined suggested retail price of the software.
A CP/M computer in 1982?
It may be surprising that a company was able to launch a successful computer running CP/M in 1982, after the introduction of the IBM PC. But the IBM PC didn’t take over the industry overnight. In May 1982, the IBM PC had only been on the market for about six months, and while it was beginning to attract software development, its software library was limited and the computer itself was expensive.
Kaypro sold the Kaypro II for $1,795 and the hardware included a 2.5 MHz Zilog Z-80 CPU, dual floppy drives, 64K of RAM, and a 9-inch monochrome display for the price. In the January 1983 issue of Byte, longtime columnist Jerry Pournelle wrote about his initial experience with the Kaypro II. On page 431, in the middle of Pournelle’s column, a mail order ad offered several competing computers. One of the computers on offer was an IBM PC with 64K of RAM and dual floppy drives, priced at $2699.95. The ad stated the retail price was $3185.95 for that configuration. It didn’t include a monitor and the only software it included was IBM Cassette Basic in ROM. Even the operating system was a separate purchase.
The same ad offered a Franklin Ace computer, a clone of the Apple II+, for $1499.95. It included a single floppy drive and a monitor at that price, but no software. So Kaypro priced its machine like an Apple II clone.
The popular narrative today is that the IBM PC killed CP/M overnight. But there was still plenty of room in the market in 1982 and 1983 for affordably priced CP/M machines. For a time, Kaypro sold 10,000 units a month, which was enough to make it the fifth largest computer maker in the world in 1983. Yes, it sold well even though Compaq launched its IBM-compatible portable around the same time.
Critical reception of the Kaypro II
There wasn’t anything reovlutionary about the Kaypro II. It was a briefcase-sized computer that ran CP/M. Osborne had been selling a computer that met that description for 13 months. But Kaypro gave you a much larger 9-inch screen and higher capacity disk drives for the same price as Osborne. It was a nice incremental improvement over the Osborne. And both of them came bundled with a selection of useful software.
The aluminum case met with mixed reviews. It was rugged and kept the machine’s weight down. Even though its monitor was almost 40 percent larger than the Osborne, it only weighted 16 percent more. The 9-inch display that could render 80 columns of text was worth the extra 4 pounds. But both PC Magazine and Personal Computing magazine mocked Kaypros as tin cans or tin boxes.
The general consensus was that Kaypro struck a nice balance. The Kaypro II was a utilitarian, unglamorous computer, durable, reliable, and completely adequate for someone needing to run early 1980s business software. Nothing about it was state of the art, but but it didn’t have any major drawbacks either. It was solid.
Drawbacks to the Kaypro II
The major drawback of the Kaypro II was its lack of expandability. It had no expansion slots or any other kind of system or peripheral bus, just an RS-232 port for connecting it to a modem or another computer, and a Centronics parallel port for connecting a printer. Even upgrading from single-sided to double-sided disk drives wasn’t a given. There were two different motherboards for the Kaypro II, only one of which supported double-sided drives.
The counter argument to this was that Kaypro included everything most users were going to want in 1982 for $1895. The system had 64K of RAM, two disk drives, and the ability to connect to a printer or modem.
Kaypro started moving into IBM/MS-DOS compatible computers in 1984, selling them alongside CP/M computers. Arguably, Kaypro waited too long to enter the IBM compatible market, and it went bankrupt in March 1990.
Kaypro in pop culture
In Mike Judge’s animated TV series King of the Hill, Peggy uses an old Kaypro computer from the 1980s, including a loud dot matrix printer. The illustration resembles a Kaypro 10 more than a Kaypro II, but it still fits the description of a tin box from the mid 1980s running CP/M, both long obsolete. In Season 4, Episode 10, when Hank goes shopping for a new computer that would be Y2K compliant, the salesperson jokes that a Kaypro isn’t Y1K compliant.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.