Ian just picked one of these up from me this week, for the museum in
Seattle. IIRC, it's a standard XT keyboard. However, it's been 20+
years since my Mom last used the one I gave Ian, so I'm not entirely
sure. It should run plain DOS. It would have included WordStar and
the other programs that Kaypro shipped like MailMerge.
I bought a Kaypro 2000, since I was at sea. I wish I still had my
Kaypro 2000. Awesome physical design, but horrible screen.
Zane
At 10:28 AM -0500 7/12/13, Jules Richardson wrote:
I rescued most of a Kaypro PC a couple of days ago - a
somewhat
interesting beast, being a backplane-based XT compatible. It was
actually a stray ST225 drive which I saw first (and which I expect
belongs with the system) before I spotted the machine itself,
although of course it wouldn't surprise me if the drive is snafu.
I have the CPU card, along with FDC/mem/RS232/parallel card and
ST506/412 controller card (plus case, PSU, backplane). What I don't
have is a keyboard, display adapter, floppy drive, or monitor.
Questions:
1) Does the machine need a specific keyboard, or will any old XT
keyboard work? (I say that like it's easy to find XT keyboards these
days!)
2) I'm assuming the bus is 8-bit ISA; will an 8-bit VGA card likely
work (as I have VGA CRTs laying around)? (And does anyone know what
display adapter the machine would originally have had?)
3) Will it run plain ol' MS-DOS, or does it need something a little
more uncommon due to hardware quirks?
It's very much early days right now; I've not tested the PSU yet,
who knows what faults the boards may have (but at least they're
mostly obtainable and socketed ICs) and all of my spare floppy
drives are in overseas storage, so I'm seeing this as a long-term
project, but it would be nice to eventually return it to operational
state, even if only as a floppy-only system.
cheers
Jules
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| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
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