Date   : Thu, 07 Mar 1985 20:23:21 cst
From   : "riggs, austen" <garey@UT-NGP.ARPA>
Subject: ramdisk on kaypro's

       I've seen both the SWP co-88 board and the Microsphere board in
action.  I prefer the Microsphere board.  You can by the board sans RAM's
for about $200 and right now 256K rams can be bought for about $10 each
so that one megabyte ram is about $320.  This gives you a 1 meg ramdisk
with built in print buffer for about $520.  Also the board is mounted
in a box externally (my friend put it inside the kaypro though), connected
through the parallel port, and provides a new parallel port for the
printer hook-up.  Also there is a provision for hooking it up to a separate
power supply so you can turn off your kaypro without turning off the
ramdisk.

       The SWP board goes inside the kaypro, mounted behind the drives.
It attaches through a piggyback board on the Z80 socket, so this may
preclude other upgrades that connect in the same way.  The board is limited
to 256K ram, which isn't enough to interest me (I have 2 800K floppies).
The 8088 coprocessor is allright, but because of limitations of the
kaypro as a terminal it can run very little ms-dos software.  I have a
friend that managed to get most of a C compiler working on it but a utility
package that came with the compiler wouldn,t run.

       if you want to mess around a little with ms-dos, and don't mind
a small (256K) ram disk, the SWP board would be ok, but so far it is 
unexpandable, and of 4 people I know with it, none are at all happy with
its performance as a coprocessor running ms-dos.

       I HAVE A QUESTION NOW--------

       Has anyone out there managed to get a hard disk running on a Kaypro?
I'm about to attempt it.  There is a company called HDS out in California
that sells an adapter that goes in the Z80 socket and provides a SASI 
interface for a hard disk. The price is $95 and supposedly includes the
BIOS patch and formatting software etc.  The trouble is I've called them
3 times so far.  Each time I get an answering service and am promised
that HDS will call me back later and they never have.  i'm not sure I
want to deal with a company like that at all, but if their adapter works
then for $250 (for a Western digital Hard Disk controller), and $200 to
$400 for a 10 mbyte hard disk, plus $50 or so for cables and a power supply
adds up to $650-$750 for the set-up, less if I use the $75 5 Meg disks 
available.
       Does anyone have any suggestions or experiences to relate about 
putting a hard disk on a Kaypro?

                       Thanks  jim Garey  garey@ut-ngp.arpa