I have to admit that I’m hopelessy behind everything at the moment, mainly because that little C64 gaming article ballooned into something a bit bigger which needs a little more time. In the meantime, I’d like to give a huge shout-out to Terry Stewart from New Zealand, who has one of the biggest collection of vintage computers of all sorts, shapes and sizes and shows them all in incredibly detailed videos on his Youtube channel, in articles on Website and also on Google+. I’ve spend a lot of time browsing around and watching his videos, learning a lot about all those other old computer I never knew of.

He even has a Kaypro II, which you can see in the video embedded below – it’s not exactly like a Kaypro 2x, the first computer I ever encountered, but it’s very close.  It sounds a little different than a 2x (there’s a short video here with the distinct floppy drive sounds), but the case and keyboard seem to be largely identical – the only differences are the huge vertical floppy drives of the II while the 2x had two half-height horizontal drives. Terry gives a great overview of the available software live on the machine itself and he also shows some of the huge amounts of manuals you got with the computer back then. He also demonstrates Kaypro IV later in the video, which seems to be closer to the 2X than the II. I distinctly remember the rudimentary graphics capabilities which only a few demos actually used, but we never had this rather sophisticated Space Invaders clone – only two games called Ladder (a sort of Donkey Kong clone) and Catchum (a simple PacMan knockoff), all using only ASCII characters!