On Monday, May 2, 2022 at 9:50:08 PM UTC-4, dxforth wrote:
> On 3/05/2022 10:02, Mark Lawler wrote:
> > ...
> > May sound odd, but there was a period of time where the owner of the dealership had me cracking open the cases, removing the drives, moving the jumpers on the drives, remounting them, and putting the case back on...
> There were similar stories about memory upgrades for PET computers. Customers
> could save money by buying a smaller-memory PET and installing the missing ram
> chips themselves as different models began using a common motherboard. There
> was even a claim of dealers or factory drilling holes in the motherboard so as
> to circumvent that. Strange days indeed.

When I was a grad student in Chicago in the '80s, I bought one of the first Kaypro 2 (versus II) models, usually referred to as a 2/84, since that was the model year. Block graphics characters and the ability to underline and bold on screen. One parallel port and (IIRC) two serial ports, two half-height SSDD floppy drives. You could easily swap out the drives for DSDD units (which I did) and it would become, for all intents and purposes, a 4/84.. It came with WordStar but NOT with Perfect Writer (which the II had shipped with). I bought a copy of Perfect Writer since that was my preferred EMACS-like editor, and later built a version of ROFF4 for better text formatting (which I sent to an Okidata Ml92 and/or Anderson-Jacobson teletype). I also had SuperCalc, which was a pretty good spreadsheet for the time, and dBase II, and wrote my own program for generating mailings (which I used to set up interviews for my dissertation).

It would NOT boot off a Kaypro II boot disk, to the best of my recollection, though it could certainly read II,2,IV, and 4 (and 10!) floppies. Sometime after I got it, I added an Advent TurboROM which added many, many features (like a type-ahead buffer) and allowed it to read dozens of different CP/M disk formats, as well as MS-DOS DSDD formatted disks. Still later I added an 8088 co-processor/256K RAMdisk, which made it blazing fast for the time (I preferred Perfect Writer as an editor, and put its swap file on the RAMdisk).

That machine led to my marriage and to about 15 years of employment as a software engineer. Not too shabby!