Kaypro Origin Stories

Andy Kay:
Late in 1978 I was on my way to Europe. I stopped off in Boston to talk to some customers. I didn't have time to see Bill McDonald, but talked with him by phone. He was my classmate and had worked for me for five years in the 1950s. While we talked I found out that he was involved in microprocessors attached to milling machines. Before I could ask him if he would come and work for me again, he asked if I had anything for him to do, and I said by all means. He moved west and was onboard by the spring of 1979.
We began to look at what was being developed in microcomputers. We bought some, tore them apart, and I asked, "Can we build these things?" Bill said, "Yeah we can build computers, but where would we sell them?" And that scared me enough that I put this on the back burner. Then in the spring of 1981, I read in Time Magazine that Radio Shack sold 120,000 computers in their first year out. And I said, what have I been waiting two years for? In the meantime, since Bill started working for me again, we had put microprocessors into some of our instrumentation, so we had developed the engineering expertise to build our own computers. I said go.
We had our first unit ready the following year, which we introduced at the West Coast Computer Faire, in San Francisco, in April of 1982.
(Computer Shopper, August 1989)