Kaypro 16

Development

The Wister Board

As time when on it became clear that CP/M was going to fail. Compaq, who basically copied us in terms of the design, was succeeding. Compaq’s had the MS-DOS operating system, but they were identical to a Kaypro in design. Our goal became to build a PC compatible.

And so there was a period of time, maybe 10 months, maybe a year, where everyone was talking about ‘the Wister board’. The Wister board was going to save our bacon. The board was going to be PC compatible and blow everybody out of the water. ‘Wister’ referred to one of the engineers, if not the chief engineer, whose name was Jay Wister. The Wister board never materialized, it got talked up and talked up, and it just never appeared. So they bought a PC compatible board from some Taiwanese manufacturer, but also paid for a redesign of the board to break it into two pieces so that it would fit inside a Kaypro case. That became the Kaypro 16.
(Interview with Marshall Mosley)

Release

InfoWorld Feb 18, 1985

"Kaypro is also going after the I.B.M. PC XT market with its new Kaypro 16 model, more than $1,000 cheaper than a comparably equipped XT. Kaypro also throws in free word processing, spreadsheet and database software to sweeten the deal. A Kaypro 16 with 256K random acess memory, a 10-megabyte hard disk and 320K floppy disk, and a letter quality printer costs $3,295."
(New York Times, March 12, 1985)

"The Kaypro 16E family is a series of transportable IBM PC work-alikes based on a 4.77 MHz 8088 processor. They are available in two versions, each with three levels of memory expansion. The Kaypro 16/2E comes with two 360K floppy drives and an ATlike keyboard, while the Kaypro 16E has a 10-megabyte hard disk, one 360K floppy drive and the standard K16 keyboard.

A standard K16 system has 256K of memory and can be purchased with or upgraded to either 512K or 640K. The same multivideo card used in the KPC is now used in the Kaypro 16E family the "E" is for enhanced video. A Kaypro 16E comes in a standardsize Kaypro chassis."
(Profiles V3 N6)

News

Kaypro Corporation has reduced prices on the Kaypro 386 line of supermicros, the Kaypro EXTRA! EXTRA! complete desktop publishing systems, the Kaypro 16E, and the 162E. ...

All configurations of the Kaypro EXTRA! EXTRA! desktop publishing system have been reduced by $500. The Kaypro 16E, a transportable IBM PC-compatible computer with 768K of RAM and a 20 megabyte hard disk, now retails for $1,595. The dual floppy Kaypro 162E is available for $1,395.
(Profiles, September 1987)

While Sperry turned away from the I.B.M. standard, a personal computer maker that had struck off on its own, the Kaypro Corporation, introduced its first I.B.M.-compatible model, the Kaypro 16. "It's what our dealers asked for," said Henry Hester, a company spokesman, although company officials said they would continue to market the older line.

Kaypro's new machine sells for $3,295, including 256,000 characters of internal memory and a floppy and hard disk drive. But it weighs 35 pounds, more than competing models from I.B.M. and Compaq, and far more than the kneetop I.B.M.-compatible machine the company officials once promised by September. Yesterday they said that machine, developed by Mitsui, a Japanese company, had been delayed from six to eight months because of troubles with its flat screen display.
(New York Times, November 15, 1984)

IBM Compatibility

"CP/M systems were on the way out. Everybody was switching to IBM-compatible systems. We had to rush one out the door to keep our dealer base happy. That was in 1984. It was a generic MSDOS system, it didn't run all the IBM-compatible software. We stuffed it inside our CP/M case."
(Andrew Kay, Computer Shopper, August 1989, pg 420)

Rod Canion one of the founders of Compaq writes that as they were developing their Compaq Portable they realized by March of 1982 that even MS-DOS (the version Microsoft sold) and PC DOS (the version IBM included with their machines) were not fully compatibile. This is in addition to the well known challenges of producing an IBM compatible BIOS.

We had discovered that the version of MS-DOS Microsoft was selling to everyone at the time wasn't compatible with PC DOS, ...

Microsoft didn't have it (the PC DOS code base to sell to others) because it had delivered MS-DOS to IBM almost two years earlier, and although they had jointly developed the product that became PC DOS, IBM owned it. The many changes and improvements they had jointly made during those two years were not available to Microsoft's other customers. Not only that, a different group in Microsoft had made many changes to the common MS-DOS version during the same time period, so what it was shipping to their other customers was very different from what it had originally delivered to IBM. ...

In late 1983, another pivotal point in the creation of a true industry standard occurred. Microsoft contacted us about an important matter: They wanted to know if Compaq ws getting into the software business. They had noticed our dealers were selling more of our version of MS-DOS than Compaq computers. Customers were buying our software to use on other PCs.

We assured Microsoft that we had no such intentions. Then we licensed our version of MS-DOS to Microsoft to make our life simpler. Our engineers had found and fixed hundreds of incompatibilities, so our version of MS-DOS had become very different from the one Microsoft was distributing. Every time Microsoft issued a new version, we had to make so many changes that the time and cost became prohibitive. By licensing our version to them, the distribution version we and others received would already have those changes.

It appeared we were giving away the "family jewels" because all our competitors would receive a more compatible version of MS-DOS. There was a significant delay, however, between the time we sent Microsfot a new version of our DOS and when our competitors received it and integrated it into their products. Each time we introduced a new advancement in one of our computers, it was fully backward compatible on announcement day. It would take months before that version of MS-DOS found its way into a competitor's computer, so we were still able to maintain our reputation for delivering the most compatible PCs. (Open, Rod Canion, 17, 21 & 57-58)

Manual

Kaypro 16 User's Guide

Addendum Kaypro 16E