Madden, anyway, wanted his machines to run proven CP/M programs like dBASE II and WordStar; he felt they were powerful enough for the jobs he required; he needn’t mess with the more fashionable 16-bit, IBM-style micros. Hard disks would help, though. “I’d been a partner in a public accounting firm,” he said, “and I’d picked up a hard disk for myself, and it ran much faster than floppy disks, and I didn’t ever want to go back to floppies.”
So he set his sights on Kaypro 10s—with hard disks built in—and began mapping out his networking scheme.
With twenty-one Kaypros, each offering around 10 megabytes of useful storage, his company’s computers could stash away over 200 megabytes, or more than three times the space on the IBM mini.
“I don’t think people appreciate the power of micros in a network configuration,” he said.
But which network to buy?
“We were just looking at the ability to share and update the files on our disks from any location,” Madden said. “And we wanted the ability to share equipment like printers. We didn’t need an elaborate electronic mail or message system. We already had intercoms. And we also didn’t need the ability to transmit graphics.”
From the start Madden knew he hadn’t the slightest use for a deluxe network, such as one called Wangnet, which could transmit voice and even TV pictures but didn’t come in a version working with the Kaypro.
Well, how about Xerox’s Ethernet? Xerox was hoping that Ethernet would become an industry standard, and some users loved it. “Ethernet has been very good for us,” said a computer man with the Kentucky state government, a test user; he told Computerworld of “excellent productivity gains.”
Ethernet, though, like Wangnet, didn’t run with the Kaypro at the time Madden was shopping, and it also had too much capacity for him.
What’s more, a version of it crashed during a demonstration when two people were trying at the same time to read an electronic file. Madden moved on. Reliability counted most.