I worked with a fellow who in the early 1980s wrote a book on the Kaypro. He printed to a daisy wheel printer. A chapter would take overnight to print keeping his family awake. Whack! Whack! Whack! Whack! LOL. (RIP Bill L.)

@rommix0

3 ай бұрын

That would have been one of those nights his wife would have made him sleep on the couch, but in the end it was all worth it lol.

@dadawoodslife

3 ай бұрын

Back in the day, we used Kermit, which seemed to be available for anything, and hook different machines together by serial cable sand send files from one to another using Kermit. Which got around incompatible disk drives.

Your Kaypro IV has Kaypro 4 written all over it

@eugiblisscast

Ай бұрын

That's what I was thinking

I’m 39 and I really hope the younger generations take the time to appreciate things like this and understand how computers work. It’s so useful to not only know how to use technology on the front end, but also what’s happening behind the scenes. There was a time where you needed to have a basic understanding of both sides to use a computer. Troubleshooting tech and those types of problem solving skills are so insanely valuable IMO.

@eugiblisscast

Ай бұрын

I'm 23, and I agree ✨

Back in the 80’s I had a side gig that I would call “Folding floppies”. What I was doing was taking the 8” floppies and coping to the customers 5 1/4 “disks. There were a few different versions of 5 ¼” disk formats out there at the time, as you can see, by this video. The trick was to send a version of X-Copy receive only (as it was smaller) to the host machine and then send the full version of X-Copy to do the actual transfers. This was all done over the serial connections. What took the time was to work out the serial port set up for the host machine.

The blinking prompt on disk activity is something I haven't ever seen before, and I'm surprised it never took hold. That's actually a really good unobtrusive way to show that, and I wish it was still around.

Fun fact (if noone has mentioned it already) is that the RIFA capacitors are made by a Swedish company. It's name is Radio Industriernas Fabrikations Aktiebolag which translates to the Radio Industries Manufacturing Company.

@wilfredpayne433

3 ай бұрын

Aktiebolag, most common languages I can usually figure out the gist because they are usually sharing similar words, but that word does not tie in 😂 if you don't mind me asking, what does it translate to in English? Edit----from my astonishingly powerful abilities of deduction I've figured out it is the "company" part of the translation but I was asking for more information, just to make my vague question more sensical 😅

@osgrov

3 ай бұрын

@@wilfredpayne433 aktiebolag = a limited company in english, such as "Company Ltd." :)

@Avelanche

3 ай бұрын

That fact was not fun at all you liar.

@Okurka.

3 ай бұрын

@@wilfredpayne433 Simple Google search: Aktie = Share/stock and Bolag = Company.

@harisalic2568

3 ай бұрын

​@@wilfredpayne433it's the company type, in english it would be Ltd or PLC

Wow.. I had this exact same model! Bought it in Port Isabel, Texas in '83 (well, my dad bought it for me). Also had a Telex TTX-1014 daisy wheel printer and a Hayes 300 baud smartmodem connected to it. I also had a fake-leather soft carrying case for it. I remember I always routed the keyboard cable straight back and under the back corner of the case, then directly up to the port. Played games like Ladder (an ascii copy of Donkey Kong), Star Trader (a kind of space trading game), CatChum (Pac Man copy). Did a LOT of grade-school and high-school reports on WordStar. I wish I still had some of the old floppies.

@RonJohn63

3 ай бұрын

A Hayes? Your dad must have been rich. I could only afford an Anchor Signalman.

6:00 Rifa madness!!!!

I lioved the Kaypro!!! What a fantastic lugable! In college I was the first in my dorm to have a personal computer and I used it for both wordprocessing (WordStar for the win!) and as a smart terminal connected to the Vaxen in our Computer Science lab via its internal modem. I worked for a Kaypro dealer and at one point you could turn the lower priced half height dual single sided drives into dual sided by sinply moving a jumper on each drive... :) Best...

@nekomasteryoutube3232

3 ай бұрын

I love when new or old stuff has "Simple" "Hacks" to improve/unlock features or performance. Just sucks that most stuff these days are locked down in hardware so even if the features and capability is there, the chip (and/or circuits running it) are designed not to allow (easy) tampering to get more out of what you paid for.

@wrongmouse1658

3 ай бұрын

Yes, the Kaypro was my Resume machine when I move back to Seattle from Yakama.

@meredithglass8760

3 ай бұрын

That’s so fun and cool!! I don’t even know what a Vaxen is, what’s a Vaxen?

@martinlebl631

3 ай бұрын

​@@meredithglass8760A VAX is a mainframe by DEC. Colloquially VAXen would be plural for multiple VAX mainframes, as geeks we like to play around with language, so ox and oxen, but box and boxes, because one is animate while the other isn't, therefore as a joke we refer to computer servers as boxen as they are "live" ergo animate boxes, and therefore similarly vax and vaxen. Ah, old school nerd humor.

@meredithglass8760

3 ай бұрын

@@martinlebl631 oh 😂 that’s clever, okay cool

The Kaypro emulates the Lear-Siegler ADM-3A.

I was under the impression that the RIFAs were safety capacitors that were required. After you mentioned deleting them as they were really noise filtering, I found an article on allaboutcircuits from 2019 that explains the X and Y safety caps. If you eliminate them then you've eliminated the safety risk that a standard capacitor might create. Interesting reading and thanks for pointing out that they are not necessary.

@GodmanchesterGoblin

3 ай бұрын

I would say they're often not needed for the operation of the device that has them. However, they are not only there to protect the device from external noise, but in a device with a switching power supply, they also act to significantly reduce the conducted noise put back onto the mains and also transmitted noise radiated from connected cables.

@kaitlyn__L

3 ай бұрын

Yep, the safety is versus a regular cap rather than versus none cap :)

9:30 Kaypro had animated prompts. I repeat, it had animated prompts! I want that. For bash. On Linux. I only ever touched a CP/M only box in the 90's and it was an Osborne afair.

@bradallen8909

3 ай бұрын

Why mention Linsux. You want it for bash. The OS is irrelevant.

@DasIllu

3 ай бұрын

@@bradallen8909 are you ok, are you having a stroke or something?

@kaitlyn__L

3 ай бұрын

I believe zsh can be made to do that! I like fish myself though, even though you can duplicate everything fish does in zsh the defaults are so sensible and its way of browsing command history is so easy

19:21 Kwin wobbly windows caught me off guard.

I always thought those Kaypro's looked like serious business with that simple, industrial looking metal case and the logo font. It has a hint of 70s about it while being from the 80s.

I am all IV this video - I mean all 4 this video - I mean all four this video - I mean all for this video.

Filter caps, while not critical, are still good to have. You should replace them with modern equivalents.

The Peggy Hill computer , KOTH has made me always want one.

I can probably remember how to play Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy up to the point where the Vogons toss the 2 of you out an airlock & wake up in the Heart of Gold. The Babel Fish scene is rather complex.

did I just see an awesome rubbery effect on your desktop?! I haven't seen that stuff since old ubuntu/gnome 2!

@alexandrecouture2462

3 ай бұрын

Yes, you can turn on this effect on KDE/Plasma desktop.

The clarity on that monitor is shockingly good

I am an archaeologist and the teams i worked with used Kaypros. I think we had two and then a Kaypro IV arrived. They were luggable and indestructible ! That was their virtue. I used one in Syria, transported from Melbourne Australia to northern Syria. As a CPM machine they used Wordstar and Lotus 123 which was fine for my work. In Syria they used some sort of specialist surveyors software. It all worked like a charm. But as I recall the PC's started to arrive in the early to mid 1980's and took over - more as status symbols as Kaypros were more usable,

(I wrote a college term paper on a KayPro. Beautifully sharp screen; very easy on the eyes.) CP/M world-view is "computer connected to terminal via serial port". So where's the KeyPro's terminal? It's emulated on the motherboard. Specifically, it emulates an ADM-3A.

Those Z80 I/o chips were excellent. They worked with the processor to give hardware vectoring of interrupts, with prioritization, which meant you could do a lot of efficient interrupt driven I/o with a Z80 based system. Don't people know this? It's one of the stand out features of the processor

i will give you a hint for the hitch hikers game... you need to take pain killers to get rid of the hangover to get out of the room, and you only have a certain number of turns.

Those RIFA caps always amuse me for some reason. They were manufactured in the town where I live, and I'm friends with one of the men from the design team for those caps, lol.

I'm a simple man, I see Shelby and I instantly hit like! Keep up the awesome content and I'll keep tuning in

@binface9

3 ай бұрын

Shelby is the coolest

Keyboard connector: Plastic tends to get brittle over time. And especially something like the keyboard connector that gets a good amount of stress, it can break easily. The good news is that DigiKey sells replacement connectors that work and fit just fine. I replaced the connectors on my 4/83 and 4/84 systems.

to this day i thought that you all talk about reefer caps but after seeing the logo here and you explaining that its just the brand i finally understand you actually mean rifa

Don Maslin was the "go to" guy for archiving disk CPM OS disks back in the day. Sadly he has passed on, but much of his efforts is still available online.

@martinlebl631

3 ай бұрын

I think my brother got CP/M disks from him in the mid 90s, when we ended up with Osborne 1 and Kaypro at a university surplus auction. They both worked, and were interesting excursion into CP/M, which was already retro at that point.

Wordstar had a programming macro language built-in to the system. You could change whatever key sequence you wanted to something else. I wrote a bunch of modifications to Wordstar to support an old colour dot-matrix printer that I had for my Apple ii clone. The macros worked perfectly.

@TheGunnarRoxen

3 ай бұрын

that is pretty damn cool and useful

@kaitlyn__L

3 ай бұрын

Makes me think of how customisable Emacs is

Oh hey, a Kaypro 4. Not to be confused with the Kaypro IV

@jwzerbe

3 ай бұрын

You mean the Kaypro 4 '84 with the built in 300baud modem and half height 5 1/4" floppy drives! I have one of these that I bought while in college and still have it along with all the floppies and books. I also have a number of language compilers for it. At one point, I had upgraded to an external 1200baud modem, then eventually a 9600baud.

@kaitlyn__L

3 ай бұрын

And yet, after that opening, I’m even more confused why the disk definition and video thumbnail say IV rather than 4! Haha

I had the Amstrad CPC 6128, it's CP/M+ looked exactly like what you show. I also had all the infogram games. And the drive as well, a single-sided Shugart 440K 5.25" drive. Brings back memorie.

I loved the way Kaypros looked. I'm almost 100% positive Ricky Schroder had a Kaypro set up in the living room at some point on Silver Spoons, but google is failing me to finding any reference or picture of it.

This Kaypro might be old, but quite good for business work.

It's great to see a Kaypro. I grew up with a Kaypro 16 DOS machine. I have been searching everywhere for one, but I don't think they were very popular.

Dude I'm so glad I found your channel. You and your work are amazing!

Dude, your videos really are so enjoyable and fun. It truly improves my day and I am able to take my mind off of how rough things are. I think a lot of my favorite channels truly underestimate their value as how much they are enjoyed for such a bigger reason than just great fun and informational. But you deserve another level of gratitude for how much it's relaxing and straight up enjoyable. I know I'm not the only one who sees it like that. Please keep doing what you do and thank you for being you! 😊🌎❤️🕺🏻🖥️

Super cool seeing one of these again . Magically whisked away to grade school again !

WOW! The enclosure itself is a beauty !! DOUBLE WOW!!! LOVE IT!

LOVE this channel.

Great timing on this video! I just got a Kaypro 2 recently and will be going through the same process of making some floppies for it.

This is so cool. Takes me back to college, when I used an Osborne 1 that my parents gave me when they boughtg the upgraded Osborne Executive, and then I used a Kaypro when the Ozzie's floppy drive failed. WordStar was my first word processor and to my mind was one of the best in terms of being inutitive and providing good results.

1983 and all so complicated. I admire your knowledge and fascination with the hardware and software of the time.

Before you got to the game part, my first thought was “Man, this reminds me of playing The Hitchhiker’s Guide on my dad’s retired Kaypro”. Thank you for the nostalgia.

More of that CP/M stuff please ;-)

While sometimes its nice to see people fixing various issues with old stuff, sometimes its also nice when something just need little to no fixes and it just WORKS Thanks for another interesting video buds, while the Kaypro might not be a choice gaming machine, I know it did at least end up in peoples homes and offices and some viewers are probably going to have history with it.

Awesome! ...and running HHG2G, even MORE awesome!!

Regarding the RIFA / X-Capacitors: While they were used as filter caps here, there are legitimate uses where you definitely need them. X- and X2-capacitors are designed to be between line and neutral, there are also Y-capacitors which are connected from line/neutral to earth. They are built to withstand overvoltages and "heal" themselves without creating a short - which they do unless they are 30years+ and yellowed like those you showed. The thing to keep in mind is the "capacitor- power supply" used in many appliances with either low wattage or used as standby supply. There the X2 is used like a series resistor to drop voltage directly from the AC plug towards a zener-stabilized DC power supply. There you definitely need to keep them in or replace them 🙂

@kaitlyn__L

3 ай бұрын

Given neutral is connected to earth (with busbars, in the breaker box) in the UK, I wonder if there’s anything which still has Y caps sold here (presumably multi-region devices would).

I don't even like 80's computers, i'm just here to indulge in a man loving his hobby. Thank you for sharing that passion with the world!

@heyjustj

3 ай бұрын

Haha kind of the same for me. Born in 84 and always had computers in our house. Found a Vic20 in the garage when I was 11-12, read the manual and played around with it. Not interested in doing this myself, but it’s awesome and interesting seeing someone doing it today and all the hoops they have to jump through to make it functional.

@Avelanche

3 ай бұрын

@@heyjustj This has been a core male trait for thousands of years, when somebody is working on something, men will gather around, nod, all agree "yep the damn things busted" and marvel at the workings of another man.

Noise without those caps CAN disrupt other devices plugged in to the same outlet\strip. Such as printers(including one HP laserjet from the mid 1990's), external floppy power supplies, external CD-ROM drives, MODEMS, early wired networks(close cabling).

Arthur C Clarke wrote his novel 2010 on a Kaypro II in the early 80s.

11:00 I really like this this shot. The monitor with the reflection of you while using the pointer.

cool stuff... if you need a idea for a video, then i would love to se and hear about you'r floppy writing setup.... tools and hardware ... would be cool....

Would love to find a Cordata Luggable (5 inch green screen - seriously sharp!), had one years ago but it kept breaking down and I didn't know enough (back then) to fix it, would love another one now... Love this Kaypro though, next best thing in my book Like the Cordata - seriously sharp screen. Thanks for sharing this and keeping these old machines alive.

God that screen looks amazing like the day it was made.

You have to take the tablet (in pocket of dressing gown) to cure your hangover before you do anything else. Collect everything including the mail and then go out.

At university in the microprocessor course we had CP/M machines developed and manufactured by my later employer. At that time I had a C128DCR + 1581 and an Atari. While the C128's Z80 was really slow the C128 CP/M had some nice features: It supported multiple disk formats that could be extended by patching unused entries in the format table. So I was able to add the format of our machines at university and could prepare most of the work at home. The 1581 strangely had the diskette sides inverted compared to most other systems like the PCs. But as Commodore had added the feature to load own software e. g. to hook into the command interface I wrote a small piece of software that was correcting the side assignment in all commands related to MFM formatted floppy disks. Regarding WordStar I remember darkly to have patched the file which was well documented.

Very cool video, as are all your videos. We'll done.

4:20 -- Reminds me of the power LED of the Model 1 Sega Genesis 😆

The screw-downs on the serial port do the shield grounding! This is just an old-style DB-25 connector. The serial standard pin one is chassis ground, and pin seven is signal ground. It is the DB-9 that uses the shield as the chassis ground, not the DB-25.

We had a Kaypro II when I was a kid. That Nemesis game was my favorite when I was 6 or so, be careful of footpads. Did you try to lay down in front of the bulldozer in Hitchhiker’s?

It's not Abandonware if you don't ever abandon it, thanks for sharing!

Actually if you want a nice easy to use CP/M machine, all MSX machines with a disk drive have MSX-DOS which is CP/M 2.2 compatible. Uses FAT12 instead of CP/M FS and most use 3.5" floppies. The original MSX standard is only 40 columns, so be sure to look for a MSX2 or 2+

What a tank of a machine! It's just a shame that keyboard connector isn't as tank-like as the rest of the machine. I'm guessing it took a hit sometime in the past and didn't quite break completely, then age and being moved around and used finally cracked it the rest of the way. Good to see it fixed up and working though. I'm pretty sure I would've hated CP/M if I ever had to use it back in the day. It's just different enough from MS-DOS and slightly more convoluted to use that it would've frustrated the hell out of me.

Very interesting!

I have the same cleaning swabs. Did you get those because of Adam Savage's video too?

Best channel on KZread.

There was a Kaypro II edition of HHGTTG. How do I know? Because I bought it, Zork, and Planetfall all for it. Collossal caves, however, I got on 8" IBM, and the store nicely enough copied it over to kaypro format. Wordstar, dad got with the Kaypro as a bundle in. Along with Perfect Writer, Perfect Calc, Microsoft Basic (Old and new), S-Basic (a compiled basic), Catchum, and Ladder.

Thank you for using a NON-powered real screwdriver to remove these screws. the electric screwdriver tends to badly damage this old equipment!

hey! clean that office!!! lol

A Kaypro video. Dude. You are marriage material.❤

I only have Norwegian Kontiki machine. But it has a CPM clone I think. Thx for that tutorial.

4:40 For a second I thought it was super warped but it's just barrel distortion from the camera lens lmao

I bought a cpm machine a few years ago, am Amstrad PCW and funnily enough I bought it to play text adventures on. Hopefully I do better than you did in Hitchhiker's!

personally i would replace the RIFAs(with non RIFAs 😉) they dont only reduce interference from the machine to mains, but keep down spikes coming from the mains which can cause rectifier shorting failure

i got a kaypro mainboard and processor board. no case

Nice history lesson about those terminals and their lack of standards until a single dominating player came about in the vt100

I wonder if that was Peggy Hill's Kaypro

no. i like the cable in the back. it looks cleaner and its way more likely to get snagged in the front or the side.

Did you take the aspirin. You have a hangover and you have to take the aspirin to get out of the bedroom.

Heavy quality!

its cool how it still works cuz it started in 1892

KDE is awesome :)

Yes it works perfectly fine without those caps. Yes it's just sloppy work not installing them. They cost peanuts.

Your sound is running ahead and it's driving me crazy.

Hi Shelby: question. Are the config file and cpm-tools parameters for the kpiv the same for a Kaypro 2?

Dealing with the I/O ports ... Was it PIP? The Peripheral Interchange Program. The memory is vague and very fuzzy, the syntax was more than a little funky. PIP came from the PDP world I think

@robgoald

3 ай бұрын

No. PIP is the CP/M equivalent of DOS "copy" command.

@JanEringa8k

3 ай бұрын

@@robgoald - I thought PIP was also for dealing with the various I/O ports. But hey .... It was a very very long time ago :)

@JanEringa8k

3 ай бұрын

@@robgoald - Just went and dug out the CP/M PIP command reference ... and you can apparently copy stuff to/from the various I/O ports :)

@robgoald

3 ай бұрын

@@JanEringa8k Yep, I'll buy that. I remember trying that a time or two. Thanks!

I just got one of these from Ebay with drive B replaced with a Gotek drive. It came with a USB stick and I can access it fine. Could you do a video or provide me more information on how to get programs and load them on the USB in the proper format to use with the Kaypro?

Interessantes Video. Propofol kam bei mir zuletzt bei einer Magenspiegelung bei Ulcus Duodeni zum einsatz. Ich habe die ganze Nacht vor schmerzen nicht schlafen können, nach dem Aufwachen, nach dem Eingriff habe ich mich gefühlt als wenn ich Stunden lang geschlafen habe und war mehr als ausgeschlafen. Mich würde interessieren, auf welchen Effekt von Propofol dies zurückzuführen ist?

Won't those capacitors help with preventing the random CRT zap back to the PSU? I thought that could kill these old things.

C'mon. Replacement caps are like 1 buck a piece for shiny new ceramic X or Y types. Replace them, if not for your own sake, do it for the people who live around you. RFI sucks and it's just nice to have the system all complete like it should be. If you don't mind the smell of your own farts in your office cubicle, it doesn't mean that people around you won't be bothered by it.

He mentioned it is “more usable”. I ask, usable for what these days?

Wasn’t WordStar copy-protected?? You also mention a lot of games and copy-protection on floppies was pretty standard then.

23:52 That is some bizarre transparent hand stuff going on.

Rifa madness.

Slippery mustalids FTW!

so its the kaypro IV and not 4 yet is says Kaypro 4 on the side? makes sense.

Shelby, did you use a 360K drive to write those floppies? I am having difficulties creating my own floppies for the Kaypro IV with my Greaseweazle. Thanks!

@TechTangents

3 ай бұрын

Yes, you are much better off using a 40 track drive to write disks for another 40 track drive because the head on these are wider than an 80 track drive. The IV I have used Tandon TM100-2A's which are the same drives as an IBM PC. It should be possible for you to connect them to your greaseweazle if you don't have any other 40 track drives.

Do you have the Joo Jenta 200 Super Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses with your copy of Hitch Hikers? That will help you at least not notice when you die!

I had no idea the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy was a game lol

@ReinaldoRauch

3 ай бұрын

It's a set of books made by Douglas Adams, I think this is an adaptation to adventure game style at the time

@ReinaldoRauch

3 ай бұрын

Sorry, the real First thing was a comedy show on BBC radio, later then adapted to books and, of course, this game

@Metal_Maxine

3 ай бұрын

The game version was by Infocom. It is as hard as nails. The BBC had an illustrated version available on their website - it might still be there.