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Need disk images to test a Kaypro II

F

Fire-Flare

Experienced Member
Joined
Dec 17, 2009
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273
Location
Washington State
Hello all, today a Kaypro II came into the warehouse and it looks immaculate and the screen works, but I can't get it to recognize my early DOS disks.

I'm hoping somebody can upload an image of something it might be more familiar with?
 
There is another set of good kaypro disks here: http://www.retroarchive.org/maslin/disks/kaypro/ but disks for the II, 4, and 10 are all mixed in. Not sure if one is a boot disk for the II.

There was a port of MS-DOS for an optional 8088 co-processor board for the Kaypro 10. And then the Kaypro 16 was, I think, more or less a bog standard IBM PC clone in a Kaypro shell.
 
There's a II boot disk there somewhere; that's where I got mine. Don't recall which it is though.

Make sure not to get II and 2 mixed up: they are completely different.
 
KC9UDX said:
CP/M is mostly a DOS.

But if you mean MS-DOS, I think there was a port for the Kaypro, wasn't there? Academic anyway, much easier to get CP/M working, and even that's no cakewalk.
Click to expand...

No MS-DOS for the Kaypro II, I'm afraid. However, the Kaypro 16 ran it.

DOS/360 is a DOS also, nicht wahr? However, I don't know when "DOS" as a proper name came into being. Most of the supervisory system software before DOS/360 tended to include "monitor"; e.g. 7090 FMS, 1620 Monitor II, etc. or "executive" as in Univac 1107 Exec.
 
IBM had TOS - the Tape Operating System. Add support for the cool new thing of disks and tweak the name into DOS. That would 1969 with DEC following with their DOS in 1970 and DG just a little behind with RDOS and soon just about everybody had something called DOS.
 
DOS/360 was announced in 1964 and first delivered in 1966--my copy of the S/360 Assembler manual dates from 1966 and mentions DOS, TOS and BPS. I don't recall if it mentions BOS, however.

Early S/360 software implementation could be kind of rocky. For example, S/360 COBOL didn't initially include any direct-access disk support--the compiler understood the syntax, but there was no run-time support. I have a publication that describes a bunch of assembly-language routines to provide the missing DASD support. "ENTER LINKAGE" phrase...

So did IBM coin the term "DOS"? I think so--they tended to use different language than the seven dwarfs. So terms like "VTOC" and "OS" were pretty much IBM-ese, as I think, were tems like "linkage editor".
 
I made up a set of diskettes for a client's K10, K4 and KII (b282) about a month ago, and the KII image is 177KB, which means it's a SSDD format. It should be easy to recreate with a regular 360K drive and controller with, in the case of the image I have, a TDO package.
 
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