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