Date   : Wed, 28 Mar 1990 19:28:16 GMT
From   : ea.ecn.purdue.edu!wieland@ee.ecn.purdue.edu (Jeffrey J Wieland)
Subject: The Ultraboard

In article <1358@mindlink.UUCP> a577@mindlink.UUCP (Curt Sampson) writes:
>Has anyone heard of (or better yet, used) a product called "The Ultraboard?"
>It is a replacement motherboard for the Kaypro (I'm not sure which one) that
>has the Hitachi 16-bit Z80 replacement (running at 12 or 16 MHz, I think) and
>more memory, among other things.  I'd be interested in getting ahold of one of
>these, new or used, if that's possible.  Thanks.
>        -cjs    ( Curt_Sampson@mindlink.UUCP )

The UltraBoard was a replacement motherboard for the Kaypro's with a
12 MHz Z-280 and 1 Meg of ram.  It was expected to achieve 6 MHz PC AT
speeds.  It had color video for an external monitor.  It was to make
use of the hard disk controller from Advanced Engineering Concepts.

I believe that the name of the company responsible for the UltraBoard
was Hitech Research.  They were the ones who bought up a lot of Kaypro's
stock of Kaypro 10 parts and started assembling them as Kaypro 20's
with Seagate ST-225 drives.

Before that, they had a product called Handyman, which was a plug-in 
board that gave you SideKick-like features without using and of the
Kaypro's onbaord ram.  It had its own ram, and its software was in rom.

The UltraBoard was is beta-test about three or four years ago, but 
after bugs were found in the video section, HiTech ran out of money
trying to fix the problem.  The last I heard, they were working on a
SCSI interface for '84 Kaypros.

I did talk to someone there over two years ago.  He said that they
would continue development when they could.  I should dig out their
number and give them a call (if they still exist).
--
                       Jeffrey J. Wieland
                     wieland@ecn.purdue.edu