Kaypro II

On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 12:44 AM, mc68010 <mc68010 at gmail.com> wrote: I used them back in the day (c. 1985) at a couple of places. I never thought much about the design one way or the other except that I thought the screen was smaller than I would have liked (I was used to 12" or so CRTs, from VT100s and various 8-bit micros). The portability was nice, but I would have been just as happy with a "desktop" CP/M machine. While I have a Kaypro II and did enjoy borrowing one to take to VCFe to run old Infocom games on, it was never my preferred personal platform. Someone here asked why there's not much nostalgia for these sorts of systems, and in my own case, I'd have to say it has to do with my age and what machines I encountered and when (baby duck syndrome). When CP/M was a big deal in hobby computing, I was a kid and couldn't afford all the expensive hardware it took to run it (8" drives, in large part). My family only knew a few of people who owned a computer in the mid-1970s (as a hobby or for a small business). I think one family friend had a Northstar Horizon but that was for business so kids were not allowed to play on it (I don't think he had anything except business apps anyway). One friend had a Challenger III and that _was_ fun to play on, but it was no Northstar (or Kaypro). One or two owned TRS-80s once those came out, but only the lesser models, no floppy drives. On a wider scale, there were two user groups that met in Columbus in the late-1970s that I was aware of - one met downtown and was full of owners of CP/M machines, but that group was full of, to me at that age, grouchy old men who had no time for an inquisitive pre-teen; the other group met in the suburbs (i.e., harder to get to for a city kid), but was specifically a Commodore PET group. That group was welcoming to all ages, and since I was already learning on a 4K PET at the public library, it cemented my direction. My family couldn't afford a $2K+ rig, but we did eventually (2-3 years later) bought a $1K 32K PET with tape drive. So for me, CP/M was out of reach when it was at its most popular, so I never developed much affinity for it. I don't dislike it (beyond some minor quibbles), but neither was I involved with it to the point of developing any nostalgia. I knew it existed but didn't really get my hands on it until about 1985 when it was well into its decline into obscurity propelled by the massive rise of MS-DOS (which I do dislike for specific technical reasons as well as the "well everyone uses it so it must be the best" mentality that came with the monopoly). So in recent years, I've dabbled with CP/M, I own 2-3 machines that run it, but I've honestly spent more time running the Altair emulator with Simh than any real hardware in the past 20 years. One thing that I have been enjoying lately is re-reading pre-1982 Byte magazines which were chock full of Z-80 and CP/M articles and ads and, with 30 years of learning to help, finally grokking what I once read as a kid. I definitely remember reading each one but I simply lacked enough background to understand what I read (and since I didn't hang around with the CP/M crowd, I didn't know anyone who could interpret it for me). -ethan