Did I mention that I hate the Munsters? I do. I really do. What an wicked trick for my subconscious to play on me.
In other computing news, while I was over at Castle Geekenstein for Independence Day festivities, I picked up my Kaypro, which by now I might actually be qualified to own. He's all set up and ready to go, and Napalm and I sifted through the stack of 5.25 floppies to find a boot disk for him. He runs well enough to play some fairly interesting games.
Thumbing through the manual, I find that he's got an expansion slot. Napalm says that probably this means that if we can find an 8-bit networking card, we can hook him into the network. Otherwise, we can connect him to Eddie through one of his ports.
I dubbed him Melvin. "Wait," said Azagthoth, the Jolly Goth. "There's no Melvin in the Munsters."
"I know. Remember, I didn't purposely choose the Munsters - that was my subconscious. My conscious mind is having nothing to do with it."
Melvin is a Kaypro 16/2, tricked out with maximum options. That page is not entirely accurate for this model - Eddie has the max of 640K of memory, not 512. I'm guessing that the specs for the 16/2 differ from the 16 even more than the author indicates.
From the manual:
The KAYPRO 16/2 is a transportable, MS-DOS based microcomputer system which is functionally compatible with the IBM PC. Most software that runs on the IBM PC or IBM PC XT will run on the KAYPRO 16/2. The KAYPRO 16/2 will not read diskettes created on a KAYPRO 2, 4, or 10.
That's because earlier Kaypros used CP/M instead of MS-DOS. Melvin's got MS-DOS 3.2.
Standard features are:
- MS-DOS operating system
- 8088 processor
- 256K standard memory
- Upgradeable to 640k RAM with Kaypro board
- Two integral 360K double-sided double-density diskette drives
- 9" monochrome CRT with 80 columns and 25 lines
- High resolution (640 by 200) bit-mapped graphics in black and green (black and white on an external screen)
- Medium resolution (320 by 200) bit-mapped graphics in any 4 of 16 shades of green (16 colors on an external screen)
- Composite and RGB video output connectors
- One asynchronous serial port
- One parallel printer port
- IBM PC-compatible keyboard
- Word-processing software
- Data base management software
- Spreadsheet software
- Communications software
- GW-BASIC language (BASICA-compatible)
- One user expansion slot
The technical information section of the manual even contains pinouts for all the ports, because at that time, these things weren't standardized at all. It even has a memory map and a list of I/O port addresses. Now that's a manual. Heh, it even smells good. Smells like a really old hymnal, or an encyclopedia from the '20s.
Napalm believes that much of the software he has for his classics will also run on Melvin. Wlofie mentioned that an Amiga monitor might work with the video port. Whether Melvin can be of any practical use in this day and age is pretty doubtful; I mean, he is capable of much, but not as capable as any of my other tools. Still, I expect him to be fun, which is why I have him.
