Kay waged his marketing war from several hillside buildings in Solana Beach, a small town near San Diego, hundreds of miles south of Osborne and the rest of Silicon Valley. His was a family business. Kay’s personal housekeeper served salads and fruit juice in the corporate lunch room, and his eighty-six-year-old father, known around the plant as “Grandpa,” repaired electronic equipment and ran a forklift. Andy Kay’s wife was secretary of the company. One son, David, was the vice-president for marketing and had helped develop the Kaypro; a second son worked in personnel, and a third ran the print shop; and Andy Kay’s daughter and her husband had designed the buildings—which were now the same light blue as the “KAYPRO II” lettering on the computer. Altogether, some 450 people worked for Kay’s company by mid-1983. That was more than twice the number a year earlier when the Kaypro II was just hitting the market and Kay was counting on a mere $10 million in sales.
Bulldozers were growling away amid the expansion, and the company newspaper said equipment-cluttered grounds resembled a scene from a bad disaster movie.
No longer was Kay a semiobscure maker of voltmeters and oscilloscopes and other test equipment. Sales, once $4 or $5 million annually, were barreling along toward $100 million. Even his company name soon changed—from Non-Linear Systems to Kaypro—in recognition of the success of the division making his hot new computer.
Wall Street and Andy Kay were getting to know each other. That summer four million shares of common stock hit the market at $10 each; and the prospectus said Arthur B. Laffer, the “Laffer Curve” economist, would serve on the board of directors. Kay still owned most of the company personally. And now, with the new money, he could give IBM and Apple a better fight. “After 30 years in business,” San Diego Magazine had said, “he’s suddenly the new kid on the block, clutching under his arms a couple of excellent bags of marbles.”[[9]]
Before the Kaypro, Kay hadn’t exactly been on the verge of starvation—he owned an art-filled home overlooking the Pacific and gave to the local symphony and other cultural causes—but now he’d reached the point where his admirers were depicting him as a silicon-age Horatio Alger character.
That’s a little exaggerated. Kay, though poor in his New Jersey days, was never an orphaned newsboy toughing it alone.
“Grandpa” prodded Andy. Frank Kopischiansky—an Eastern European immigrant and an ex-coal miner—worked in silk mills and wool factories and as a chauffeur. Frank had come to the United States from what is now Poland. Andy Kopischiansky would later become Andy Kay after his original name baffled some colleagues at work and they kept calling him “Kay” for short.
The Kopischiansky home lacked a bathtub. “But,” Andy recalled, “we always had food, and I always had a nickel in my pocket.” Frank enjoyed fixing broken-down cars and tinkering with electrical equipment, and Andy himself built a shortwave radio when he was only twelve years old. Math was another love. Andy even considered a career as an actuary after Prudential Life told him he could eventually make $15,000 a year. “I flipped out,” Andy said, “because it was a lot of money in 1935.” Frank shrugged off the $15,000, however. “That’s not very much,” he said. The words, incredibly, came from a man who seldom made more than $1,000 a year during Andy’s youth and who sometimes earned just $15 a week.
Andy, growing up in Clifton, New Jersey, took it for granted he could never afford college, but then the letters M.I.T. came up in a drafting class.
“What’s that?” Andy asked. “I’ve never heard of the place.”