Interview with Marshall Mosley

My Interview with Marshall Mosley
(July 18, 2025 - Cave Creek, Arizona)

I sat down with Marshall Mosley at a local restaurant for two hours over breakfast. The following is the transcription of the relevant parts our conversation. Parts of this transcript appear/will appear under the appropriate topic pages.

Famous writers from Profiles

Profiles was this weird intersection in time. I don't know why it happened, but a lot of writers who later became famous wrote for us, though David Gerrold was established before he wrote for Profiles [Profiles, July 1984]. Gerrold wrote the teleplay for Trouble with Tribbles, for the original Star Trek TV series, the novel The Man Who Folded Himself, and the War Against the Chtorr series. Robert J. Sawyer and Ted Chiang, both later multiple Hugo and Nebula Award winners, wrote for us. So did Jack Nimersheim, who was nominated for a Hugo. In the mid-90s Ted Chiang wrote The Story of Your Life, which was later made into the movie Arrival, with Amy Adams.

Marshall getting hired at Kaypro

I moved from New York to California when I was twenty-two. My first night there I said to myself “Self, it's California, it's December 1983, it's 75 degrees – time for the hot tub!” So I went to my new apartment’s hot tub. I’m sitting in the tub and this woman who looks to be in her mid-40s comes and sits in it with me. We're chatting, and she says, “What do you do?” And I explain I just arrived, and she said, “So you’re looking for work?” And I said, yeah. And she says “Well, I'm an employment counselor. What can you do?” And I explained that my most recent job was in a warehouse driving a forklift.

And she said “Well, not 200 yards from here is this new company, Kaypro Computers. And if you go in there the first day and ask to apply, they'll turn you down. Go in the second day, ask to apply, they'll turn you down. Go in the third day, they'll hire you.” I don't know how she knew this magic formula, but it was exactly as she said. And so I became what at Kaypro was called a material handler.

The guy who came down to the lobby to interview me was named Alan Ogden. He was the head of material handling. I'm sure he must be passed away by now because he was almost 60 then. But he was just a sweet guy, a former hippie. Really thoughtful, really quiet, but very decisive.

Myself and another guy named Kai Sorenson were the only two Americans in material handling. There were about twelve people in the department and none of the Mexicans spoke English. And Kai was right out of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure; he had that southern California surfer accent where he prefaced everything with ‘Dude’. They must have videotaped him or something for the movie.

At the time the warehouse didn’t exist. They're were assembling, I believe, in three separate areas of the original buildings. As for my work, assembly would just order stuff and I'd drive down to the self-storage units and get the pallet and drive it up. I was driving hard drives, sheet metal, and everything up. I did that for a couple months.

As for how the computers were put together, there were three parts to that: board manufacturing, where they had the vats and the dip and the whole thing, which was next to the Profiles offices. Then they had what I believe was called ICs, where they populated the boards with all the integrated circuits. Then they had assembly, which is where they put the computers together.

Material Handling Problems

FR: "Why do we sometimes see such wild swings in the serial numbers?"

It's because it was whoever was working the line that day. The assembly was run by a Mexican woman in her mid-50s, and she ran it like a military unit, and she was very good. But when she was not there they would make stuff up. It was whoever happened to be in that day.

And you had complaints about that because when they came back to repair, repair would say, what is this? And it turned out that they figured out that they were making up serial numbers in assembly. And they did something to solve it but by that time I was in publications, and it wasn't really my concern.

FR: And with the inventory that they had, how well did they do First In, First Out? Did the pallets stack up or did they have a system to keep pallets rotating?

No. When I was a material handler, they didn't. That came up and I mentioned it and was told to mind my own business. You actually wanted the pallets in the back to be the first out because they were the oldest. The self-storage units we used were about 12 feet wide and maybe 24 feet deep. So one would fit six pallets. You would have the three pallets in the back that were put in place three months ago and then the three up front that were put in place three days ago because you're constantly putting in the first three, taking out the first three, putting in the first three, taking out the first three. And the back three never moved. I remember saying to Alan Ogden that it should be like groceries. So you rotate and bring him to the front. And he basically said, you're right, but I don't have the people. I would need to hire two or three more people and I don't have permission to do that.

Inventory Department

Andy Kay hired a guy named Gene. I wish I could remember Gene's last name. Gene was about 75 years old and he wore, in hot Southern California, gray wool slacks, a plaid shirt, bow tie, and a jacket with patches on the elbows. He seemed very patrician.

Andy hired Gene to create and run an inventory department because they were losing inventory, they couldn't keep track of it. Gene came down to material handling and because we handled inventory all day long he interviewed me and Kai. He pulled me out of material handling to be in the inventory department.

Gene created a system of inventory called cycle counting. The goal was, you count 5% of your total inventory every day. It's a different 5% each day. So, as time goes by after three to four months you have a very accurate view of your inventory.

I did inventory with three other people and very quickly, Gene said, “Well, Marshall, we're going to make you the department head.” And I said, “I thought you were the department head.” He replied, “No, I'm the supervisor.” Because he just loved to supervise by sitting at his desk and looking out the window. But he was a very bright guy, and he would take all the information and write it down in these big ledger books, like you see in the old west movies. After a few weeks I said “Gene, we're a computer company, why are we using ledgers?” He said, “Because I know how to use ledgers. But, I'll tell you what. You come in at 8, instead of 9, and you work from 8 till noon, teaching yourself how to computerize our inventory. And then you do your counting. I'll talk to you in a few months.”

That was the single thing made my life, made my career. Those hours of study, that time teaching myself to program computers.

To computerize the inventory I used dBase II on a Kaypro 10. The way it worked was that Andy Kay wanted the inventory reports every morning so the whole inventory department was oriented around producing those reports for him so that's what I did for over a year.

During that time I went to UCSD and took a Pascal course, I had learned a little electronics in high School, but I went down to the repair department and I learned how to repair Kaypro computers, because I thought it was something I needed to know.

Andy Kay calls me up one day, and invites me down to his office. He was there with a woman who was the head of accounting; she was big, she was mean, and she didn't like anybody. I was not enthused. So I go and sit down in his office and he's says, "We're missing $10 million. Your inventory is showing 10 million less than accounting is showing,” and I said “I'll go over it with you” and I went over it with him and the head of accounting was very challenging. She was very aggressive and I said to her look I'll break it down if you want to look at the programming. And she replied “No.”

I left his office and within a few days they figured out someone had stolen a truck full of Kaypro 10s. To the south of the Kaypro campus was a bare hillside where they had cut and leveled dirt tracks, forming 4 semi-circular bands going up the hill. There they parked trailers full of stored integrated circuits, sheet metal, and finished computers. And they figured out the ten million was missing because one night someone pulled up, hooked up a truck, and drove out with the Kaypro 10s.

NY Times

At the time I had just turned 24 and this I thought to myself “You are so out of your league.” My software was good, it was right and she was wrong, but I realized I was punching way above my weight, career-wise. And I never had any interest in being a corporate inventory guy.

Profiles

So I went down to see the woman who ran publications, her name was Paula White. She was five foot nothing, in her late thirties, very cheerful, and very chipper. A very nice woman and tough as nails.

I said, "Can I come and work and be a technical writer?" She said, "Yes". So I transferred, I handed over the inventory department to the woman who ran accounting, and I went and became a technical writer. I went back to UCSD and took technical writing classes. That's was what I did for another year.

Then Diane Ingalls, the co-editor of Profiles, came to me and said, we need an assistant technical editor to help out Tom Enright. So they hired me and they taught me. And again, this is just a blessing I'll never forget.

Diane used to be a reporter with the San Diego Union [now the San Diego Union-Tribune]. She sat me down and taught me how to to be an editor. She taught me the craft - the attitude, the mindset, and the skills. My father was a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune and HE did not teach me as much as Diane Ingalls did. I’ve used those skills my whole life.

Anyway, after a while I became a good enough editor. After a half a year I started to write my own articles. And they gave me the Q&A column. In early ‘88, Tom Enright left. He got another job somewhere. And I became the technical editor.

Profiles Q&A Column

I had a column called Q&A, which was completely made up. It was supposedly questions from customers but I just made up the question and then the answer. I tried to come up with things that I thought people should know. It was things that weren't immediately obvious, like a lot of people who bought CP/M machines didn't know CP/M had a command processor. You could create batch files just as you could with MS-DOS. Or I’d explain how to use PIP, because PIP was counterintuitive. It was ‘PIP then target then source’ instead of ‘PIP then source then target’.

I would create questions and answers from issues I had run into, or what support had told me about. I would make things up like ‘Joe Cochrane from Akron, Ohio wants to know blah blah’ and then answer it. It was just a way to impart technical information the subscribers needed.

But the articles were very different because the articles were ferociously factual. Diane Ingalls would not tolerate for one moment being loosey-goosey with the facts. If she thought I was doing that, she'd walk in to my office and hit me in the back of the head.

Early Profiles avoided talking about Kaypro

FR: The earlier profiles appeared to almost avoid talking about Kaypro products.

It was the original [actually the second] editor, and I never worked for him, I think I met him once before he left. His name was Tyler Sperry. When he left Gwyn Price took over and she was a very impressive woman. Hard charging, good humored, just nice. Didn't take any BLANK from anyone, but a very, very positive person. And that's when the magazine changed. More about technical detail, more about what customers needed, more about what they were interested in. She came on I think about four months before I started working at the magazine.

Post Kaypro

But by that time the writing was on the wall. Everybody could see that Kaypro had not transitioned to the PC compatibles fast enough. The company that would become Dell Computers at the time was called PC's Limited, and PC's Limited and Compaq were just kicking our butt. So, in the summer of 1988 I started looking for other work. I got a job as a technical writer for Computer Associates in Sorrento Valley.

But my entire career, everything I’ve done, all the work I’ve done in my life, it all comes back to that experience at Kaypro and the opportunity that company gave me.

Some parts names and the "little sticker"

You had hoods and chassis. The hoods were the three-sided sort of thing that went over that had Kaypro painted on the side. Then the chassis was the the base with the vertical face in the front with the gap for the CRT and then the back with the gaps for the DB9 and the RS232 with a little sticker, there's always a little sticker on the back for the assembly line. It would be a one or a two or a three [up to 6] and you would know which assembly line assembled it, so that when it came back to repair, they would know which group had more frequent problems. Who was building things poorly.

Kaycomp machines on Campus

And I remember the Kaycomp. It predated the Kaypro 2. When I went to work there in 84, there were only 3 of them on campus. There was one in repair. I think there might have been one in David Kay's office, that was sort of on display. I know there was another one somewhere, but I don't remember where.

Tandon Drive Problems

The Tandon [disk] drives suck. Excuse my language. But 40 years later, the amount of pain they caused still reverberates. They were not well-made. The guys in support spent a lot of time with dealers, like a technician in Boise, explaining how to adjust the armature. And that was not their skill set. They were there mainly for how to use WordStar, how to use Perfect Filer.

The juice bar

David Kay was a super health-conscious. He subsidized the juice bar and this is maybe 20 years before Jamba Juice. It was on the third level of original buildings. You could just go up there and they would make you fresh carrot juice and they would make you a fresh smoothie and it was about 75 cents. It was delicious and that was driven by him he insisted on it.

Andy was even-keeled

I liked Andy. Returning to the inventory issues I discussed earlier -- I've met people in my career who would have called me, the 22-year-old high school graduate, into their office, blamed the young man, and you know, tore him a new one. Andy didn’t do that. He was just even-keeled, very thoughtful, gave each person equal credence, and went about solving the problem. And so I had a lot of respect for Andy Kay.

The Warehouse

''FR: When the warehouse was built you were already with profiles at that point or were you still working with inventory?

I was still in inventory when the warehouse opened. Because I had an office on the second floor on the south end. You would walk into the warehouse at the loading dock and walk right into Osha’s (sp?) office. Osha was not federal OSHA. It was a really nice African-American girl named Osha. You would walk into Osha’s office and she was there to direct people. She was also secretary for the head of sales. She sat right next to this steel staircase and you went up the steel staircase to the second floor and there was an open floor plan. My desk was there and about four others. At the west end was a door that entered into assembly, which comprised the entire western band on the top floor.

First Row of Buildings - Easternmost

The first section of the campus, row one on the campus, I knew backward and forwards because it was where I worked. You had the lobby at the south end and then accounting and purchasing, but not the head of accounting. It was the accounting minions who worked right next to purchasing, which is understandable. Then our section the office belonging to me, Tom Enright, and Suzanne Kessling. Suzanne was an assistant editor at Profiles. The office was large because we had a big table for disassembling computers and stuff.

And then across the hall was, I believe, networking. And then down the hall was publications, the publications manager, and then the technical writers in one office. And across from that, I believe, was people who dealt with foreign sales. And then came the vats for making the boards and you really wanted to not be down there. It was not pleasant being down there.

That's the only part of the campus that I could list. I think support was on level three in the middle. I know that prior to the warehouse opening assembly was on multiple levels. I think there were three big assembly rooms. Two on one level, one on the other.

Grandpa Kay

On level four you had Grandpa Kay's workshop. He was nine million years old and at any other company he would not have been given the keys to drive anything, but at Kaypro he was given a forklift. And those electric forklifts would get up to about 20 miles an hour. He was a real hazard. What you would hear is the tires on the cement and usually at the same time him shouting at you in Polish to get out of the way – and you had better jump out of the way because he wasn’t stopping.

David would have to handle it when people would complain "He almost killed me" and "What kind of place are you running here?" David would try to handle it professionally which he did. But at the same time he answered to his father and his family, and doing anything about it was a non-starter.

The Wister Board (Kaypro 16)

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.

Kaypro 286i

Then they did the Kaypro 286i. Based on the Intel 80286 processor. It was was a gun-metal gray large desktop computer and a clone of the IBM PC AT – the first one in the United States. When I first got to Profiles, I got a Kaypro 286i because I needed it for evaluations. And people were angry with me. There were far more senior people who didn't have a Kaypro 286i sitting on their desk. I had a coprocessor, I had a Hercules graphics card. The head of sales would come by and just give me a dirty look.

I also had it because I had to speak to Jerry Pournelle, to whom Kaypro had given a 286i. He was a renowned science fiction writer who wrote with Larry Niven. He co-wrote Lucifer's Hammer. He was also a columnist for Byte Magazine which is why he was on my radar and why we gave him a 286i.

As to how we offered the first PC AT-compatible, what I understood was that Andy had written a giant check to some manufacturer in Taiwan -- I mean a GIANT check -- so that we would have an exclusive license to it for a year. They [the Taiwanese company] had duplicated the IBM PC-AT.

The 286i sold more and better than the Kaypro 16. The Kaypro 16 was an 8088, but no sales were going to stop the downward spiral. The 286i’s successor, the Kaypro 386, came in the last year that I was there.

The downfall of Kaypro

Andy had a good eye for technology. One of the things was, even if that, company had been run, extremely efficiently it still wouldn't have survived. PC's Limited, which was starting in Austin, which was Michael Dell's company, were building computers in their dorm rooms. They couldn't compete with Asian manufacturing. And those were very smart people who were very efficient. They had none of the family drama, they were very focused business people, and they couldn't compete with Taiwanese and Japanese manufacturers and then later Chinese. There's no computer company in the United States that makes [entire] computers, it was never going to work.

Amber Screens

Some Kaypro 4s and Kaypro 10s had amber screens instead of green screens. A lot of the ones we made for Europe, because I think Scandinavia required amber screens.