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Kaypro Professional Computer (PC) XT clone, history and documentation?

Andrew Baker

Experienced Member
Joined
Mar 6, 2022
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59
I found this computer a while back (I posted about it's ega card recently and flash card back when I got it) from a reuse store locally. and have not been able to find much info about it. what I find humourous is that it is a cosmetic copy of an IBM AT with XT hardware, though kaypro did make a 286 in the same case.

It has a backplane with a cpu card, IO + Ram card and an ati ega wonder.
It has an NEC V20 and 640kb of ram, i have added a compact floash card with DOS 6.22
And two toshiba 5.25 disk drives, not sure on the exact specs but they work with 360k DS DD floppies. (i don't know much about floppies and the differences between them)

Other than this, I don't know much about this computer, it seems to me like it came a bit late to the XT market as I think ATs were around? there are datecodes in it ranging from 1984 on the bios, to 1986 on chips and cards it had a miniscribe hard drive from 1987, (it bit the dust as most onld HDDs do)

If anyone has history or documentation on this i would love to see it.

also I have a princeton graphics systems minitor from 1985 that came from the same place, they were probably paired together.

Thanks!
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Given that you could still buy a new XT in 1990, I wouldn't call that late. This is actually what we had in elementary school and what I wrote my very first C-language Hello world program on. Seeing the BIOS and RAM check messages on the screen made me recall the sound it made.
 
Given that you could still buy a new XT in 1990, I wouldn't call that late. This is actually what we had in elementary school and what I wrote my very first C-language Hello world program on. Seeing the BIOS and RAM check messages on the screen made me recall the sound it made.
Indeed. That style of case was commonly use by clone system builds like Redstone Computers computers XT Turbo system.20130905_150904.jpg
 
Ah, ok, Im not up on history, were they still 8-bit systems at that point?
 
Nice post. I have the same Kaypro computer I picked up from Computer Reset in 2019, and still have yet to power it on, let alone see what's inside.
 
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