This one came with the Juki 6100 daisywheel printer and was commonly sold as a packaged deal. I recall this combination costing about $2,500, roughly $1,800 for the Kaypro 4 and $700 for the printer. (See Eisenberg, "Writing with a Word Processor" (1983).) Adjusted for inflation this is equal to over $5,000 today. Daisywheel printers produced excellent text, but were very slow (as I recall about 10 or 12 characters per second) and noisy. Things have changed a lot today. As I write this on 3-16-08, I can get a Dell laptop with 1 gigabyte of RAM, a 120 gigabyte hard drive, and a DVD-RW drive, with an all in one printer, copier, scanner, for a total of $500. That laptop has over 15,000 times the RAM and over 150,000 times the secondary storage of a Kaypro 4! The Kaypro 4 basically just showed letters and numbers. Today we can make and watch movies, edit photos, make and view Web sites, listen to and make music, and do countless other things that were impossible on a Kaypro 4. The all in one printer can scan, copy and print with very little noise, very high speed, and very high resolution producing photographic quality prints. All of this has become possible for one tenth the price (adjusted for inflation) in less than 25 years. The computers of the early 1980s were a true revolution compared to a decade earlier. That revolution has continued, however, in the succeeding 25 years.

I purchased this Kaypro 4 '84, the printer and all original software and manuals (the Kaypro came with a whole stack of books) for about $40 to $50 at a garage sale on 3-15-08 in the San Carlos area of San Diego less than a mile from my house. The computer is in great cosmetic condition and seems to work perfectly. I was able to create a save a Perfect Writer document with no problem. The printer turns on but I have not yet been able to print a document. I could easily be doing something wrong, however, because you had to remember a lot of key commands with the early machines prior to the introduction of the graphical user interface which came along with the Apple Macintosh 128k, also released in 1984 (see below).

My Kaypro 4 Plus 88 is paired with a Star Micronics Gemini-15x dot matrix printer. It has a nine wire print head printing at 120 characters per second. The 15x allowed fanfolded paper up to 15.5 inches wide while the similar 10X allowed paper up to 10 inches wide. Generally, a wide carriage dot matrix printer like this would sell for well over $500 in 1983. (See Kathy Yakal, "The New, Low-Cost Printers," Compute! Magazine, page 44 (June 1983) at www.atarimagines.com.) (See also Vectronics Apple World (Apple ImageWriter II cost about $600 in 1985.)) Dot matrix printers at the time were fast and could do limited graphics, but did not produce true letter quality results. Daisywheel printers like the Juki 6100 were painfully slow but produced results as good as the best typewriters at the time which were often also a daisywheel design. Both were expensive and often you needed both. When I had to type a thesis in 1984, I started with renting a NEC dot matrix printer (I think it sold for around $500 to $600) and returned it to rent a daisywheel printer for the final printing. My Kaypro 4 Plus 88 also came with a large Epson dot matrix printer.

The price for my Kaypro 4 Plus 88 and two printers? Free! I acquired them at a garage sale in the San Carlos area of San Diego on March 8, 2008. It was a large garage sale. The Kaypro and printers were on the curb. I asked if they had been sold. The reply - no, they are free. What a deal! No software or manuals were included. I used the Word Star from the Kaypro 4 '84 above, however, and it worked fine. The Keyboard for my computer has a bad connection. If it is just the connection, it can probably be fixed. I tested the computer out with the keyboard from the Kaypro 4 '88 above. The computer is in fair cosmetic condition. It has some scratches and the keyboard is very dirty. I have not tested the printers.

The base model 5150 came with only 16 kilobytes of RAM, but could be expanded to 640k using the expansion slots. Each 5 1/4 inch floppy drive held 360 kilobytes of information. My IBM 5150 was purchased for $61.50 in October 2004. It has only 64k of RAM. It is in generally good working and cosmetic condition, except the trim around the monitor is cracked. It has one floppy drive and a hard drive which currently does not work. It is running on PC DOS 2.1. It also boots to Microsoft Basic if DOS is not installed. My computer is apparently the post April 1983 version. As shown, it came with a DOS guide and a BASIC guide. The base model started at $1,600 but this was with no drives or monitor. As I recall in 1983 a decent setup with drives, monitor and printer was about $5,000!

This design of iMac continued until 2002 when the very stylish flat panel monitor with half sphere base iMac came out. The original iMac design continued in the larger eMac introduced in 2002 with a 17 inch monitor and a white on white motif. The eMac was originally designed for educational use - hence the "e." While later sold to the general public, it again is now sold only to educational markets and as of the Summer of 2006 may be on its way to being phased out eliminating built in CRT monitors from the Mac mix.

TRS 80 Series: Tandy Radio Shack already had an established system of small electronics stores which are still common today in shopping areas. In August 1977 they released the Tandy Model 1 computer which, along with the Apple II and Commodore PET, was one of the first complete personal computer packages. The computer was in the keyboard. It came with a monitor and sold for a reasonable $599 with a whopping 4K of RAM. An expansion interface could be purchased for an additional $299 increasing the RAM to 16K. Initially, only cassette recorders were available for long term storage. When floppy disk drives became available they were more expensive than the computer. The photo of the cover of the Summer 1987 Tandy Answers Magazine shows the TRS 80 Model 1 on the left and the 1987 Tandy 4000 on the right. In May 1979 Tandy released the TRS 80 Model II which was directed to small business users and had a 500k 8inch floppy drive. The Model III was released in July 1980. It could be equipped with dual 178K floppy disks and up to 48K RAM. The entire computer - keyboard, monitor and drives were all in one unit. With two drives and 32K RAM it cost $2,495 in 1980, almost $6,000 in 2005 dollars! The final model in the TRS 80 series was the Model 4 released in May 1983 with 64K RAM and dual drives which I have below minus the cathode ray tube! In October 1983 a transportable Model 4 was also released having a suitcase type design like a Kaypro, Osborne or original Compaq. All of these TRS 80 computers had Z-80 processors and the Model 4 could run CPM programs in addition to the TRS DOS. Tandy in July 1980 also relased their less sophisticated Color Computer which was targeted at the home/family/gaming market. Great information, including a historical timeline and links, is available at oldcomputers.net. TRS 80 Homepage is also excellent. Another good historical timeline and summary of Tandy Computers is A Brief History of Radio Shack. Manuals are available online at TRS 80 Hardware Manual Download Page.

TRS 80 Model 100 Series: Bearing the same family name, but an entirely different computer than the Model 1 - 4 series, was the TRS 80 Model 100, made by Kyocera. This is called by some the first laptop with software develped by Bill Gates. With a great keyboard it has been used by journalists for years. More information about the model 100 is contained below. The basic premise of the machine is still carried on today in small, rugged laptops used primarily for word processing like the Alpha Smarts, marketed primarily to the educational community. The Model 100 was followed by the Model 102 and Model 200.

Tandy IBM Compatibles: Starting with the Tandy 2000 in 1983 designed for small businesses and the Tandy 1000 in 1984 designed primarily for home users, Tandy produced IBM compatible computers. The Tandy 2000 was a well designed computer but only semi IBM compatible. The Tandy 1000 and its successors such as the Tandy 1000 SX below were largely IBM compatible and competed directly against the IBM PC Jr. Tandy won that competition with the Tandy 1000 series being highly successful while the IBM PC Jr. was considered by many a flop.

Included is the "User's Manual for Level 1," by David A. Lien, copyright 1977, First Edition, Second Printing 1978. This manual itself was a great success and is a very cool part of early personal computer history. Dr. Lien was Dean of Mathematics and Physical Sciences at Grossmont Community College in El Cajon, California, about 3 miles from where I live. This Web site started out as a project for an introductory Web design class I took at Grossmont College. I have also taken a Computer Networking class there. Dr. Lien also authored a Tandy Book on MS-DOS I remember reading in the early 1990s.

Very interesting information about the Model 1 is at Ira Goldklang's TRS-80 Revived Site Model I Page, oldcomputers.net, digibarn, wikipedia, and TRS-80 Homepage. One site has a 1979 Radio Shack TRS-80 Catalog which is fascinating. A single disk drive cost $499, equal to almost $1,400 in 2007 dollars! Each 5.25" diskette held 89,600 bytes (89.6 kilobytes) of data and cost $5.95, or $16.68 in 2007 dollars. As of April 2007 you can buy a 2 gigabyte (approximately 2,000,000,000 (two billion) bytes) SD card for $15 at amazon.com. The 2GB SD card for less money in constant dollars holds over 22,000 times more information than a TRS-80 diskette. A "Model II 'Deluxe 2 Megabyte Business System'" in 1979 cost $8,737 (almost $25,000 in 2007 dollars), with 1,000 times less secondary storage than a $15 two gigabyte SD card!