13 May
2005
13 May
'05
11:30 a.m.
A couple years ago I picked up a modified kaypro II at one of the
monthly the livermore, california swap meets. Here is my best
description of it.
Start with a Kaypro II.
It has a modification to run at 5.0 MHz as well as the standard 2.5 MHz.
One of the floppies has been replaced with a hard drive, partitioned as
drives A/B/C/D. The remaining floppy is drive E. I have the original
floppy that was displaced by the hard drive.
It has been modified to have a fan.
It has a RAM disk installed in it as well.
It sports the Advent Turborom.
The only problem with it is that partition A has some bad sectors. I
when you boot or any time you do a dir operation on drive A, you get a
message about a bad sector. In fact, IIRC, you get it nine times. Then
you get the A0> prompt and everything else is fine. Drives B/C/D are
OK. Drive A, however, is missing any kind of program (such as the stock
CP/M utilities like STAT, PIP, etc) since the dir is unreadable. Drives
B/C/D have a few programs and files, but nothing very interesting.
In those past two years, I've replaced the screetching fan (which cost
me as much as the machine did originally!), and picked up a number of
kaypro manuals here and there. Don Maslin, RIP, sent me a teledisk
image of a kaypro boot disk, which I was able to regenerate and indeed,
I can run programs off of the floppy.
What I'm missing is the time and desire to figure out how to get the A
drive in a runnable state. After two years of doing not much with it,
it is time for it to find a more caring owner.
The machine and the original 2nd floppy and the manuals and boot disk
are free to anybody who cares to come and pick them up in Austin, Texas.
I have pictures of it and its innards if you want to preview it.