This mini forum is intended to provide a simple means of discussion about the Kaypro Kaypro 1 computer. If you want to share your own experience or memories, or add relevant information about this system: post a message!

I worked or Kaypro as a district manager when the Kaypro 1 was introduced. By the time the Kaypro 1 was introduced, CP/M was totally, absolutely, positively dead, and we as sales people tried until we were blue in the face to convince the Kays of that. As I recall, the Kaypro 1 sold for $999, with a dealer cost of $750 plus about $50 for shipping. Dealers had a love/hate relationship with the Kaypro. They loved them because Kaypro had a very loyal fan base, but they hated them because the margins were quite low, and there was little chance to make extra money on software and accessories because most Kaypros shipped feature-rich with the software already bundled. Dealers had no interest in the K1 because most had no one on staff who was familiar with CP/M by the time the K-1 came out, and in a market where the consumer expected a 20$ discount minimum, there just wasn''t anything in the deal for the dealer.

The price point was fabulous for a machine for somewone who was heavy into word processing, and Word Star looked about the same in CP/M as it did in DOS, but the world was moving away from text based computing towards graphics-based computing, and neither CP/M nor DOS had much of a future left by 1986.