As The Silicon Jungle was lighting up my Kaypro screen one September day in 1983, several similar machines were whirring and clicking in the Washington offices of Walter Mondale’s presidential campaign.
Kaypros kept track of donations and the $18-million budget. They helped churn out news releases, speeches, and letters to voters in important primary states. Just eighty people worked at headquarters seven months into the campaign; Kaypros and other affordable micros were a major reason why Mondale wouldn’t need legions of back-room staffers in Washington later on. I didn’t know if Mondale would win or lose the primary, but whatever happened, it wouldn’t be for want of computing power.
Forty-five miles away, near Baltimore, Kaypros at a Westinghouse plant were receiving computer messages from defense installations abroad. Other Kaypros sat on the desks of William F. Buckley, Jr., ex-Governor Jerry Brown’s research director, and the president of Tootsie Rolls; and still another, some months earlier, had helped study Barney Clark, the first man with an artificial heart. A Kaypro in the Midwest was tracking something else, the milk and manure output of cows.
All of us, Mondale’s people, the others, and I, had benefited from the struggle between Adam Osborne and Andy Kay.
Osborne, a brash ex-columnist for computer magazines, had marketed the first mass-produced portable computer. Andy Kay had soon followed with the Kaypro.
Adam Osborne was a dark-haired, mustached man in his forties who enjoyed toting his product within sight of photographers. His father, a British missionary of unconventional stripe, had tried to convert Christians to Hinduism. Nor did the younger Osborne himself blend into the crowd; he founded his computer company in 1981 and was soon comparing himself to Henry Ford and the Osborne 1 to the Model T. “I give you,” he said, “ninety percent of what most people need.”
His rival, Kay, was shorter, about five feet seven inches, but also slim; like Osborne, he had studied chemical engineering and was a maverick and newcomer in the personal-computer business. There, however, the resemblances ended. Kay was soft-spoken, graying, an old electronics hand; his friends depicted him as a quality-obsessed engineer and Osborne as a flashy marketing man. They said Osborne had seemed technically incapable of making a good portable with a nine-inch screen. Adam Osborne, in turn, spoke of Kay’s computer as if he were a four-hundred-pound wrestler forecasting an instant demise for a foe: “The Kaypro’s gonna die.”[[7]]
The computer magazines had portrayed Osborne as a lone maverick taking on the Silicon Valley establishment with the portable that the rest of the industry said couldn’t be built. But Kay claimed a similar idea had hit him at the same time.
Andy Kay had seen his son-in-law struggling to carry an Apple and its trimmings between home and office and decided that a market might exist for a small machine for engineers, architects, and other professionals. Then, Kay said, he had heard of the Osborne. Modifying their original plans somewhat, his people at Non-Linear Systems had homed in on their rival’s weaknesses, giving their own computer a better screen and a better keyboard and the ability to store more data. Adam Osborne had struck back with a jazzed-up version of his first machine. By 1983, many other companies were in the fray, including Seequa Computer Corporation, a Maryland manufacturer whose computer sold for less than $2,000 and ran most IBM-style programs.
In mid-1983 an industry expert was saying Kay and Osborne might together enjoy $200 million a year in micro sales at the retail level. That was just a fraction of the $5-billion-a-year market for business micros, but the two firms then seemed the largest makers of portables in the $1,000-$2,000 range.[[8]] Their fight was pivotal. Lines were fuzzing between economy business computers and the home machines; the winner of the portable battle might go on to fight Apple and IBM, provided it survived the onslaught of $1,000 computers that Japan was expected to unleash. By the end of the decade, powerful portables with a quarter the bulk of the Kaypro II might jam the shelves of the discount stores.