Hearing of Osborne, Kay actually was grateful in a sense. “When he started telling the world about how many orders he’s got, I said, ‘Well, if he’s getting all these orders, I’ll start making more of them.’”

Kay used an electronic spreadsheet on his newly developed computer to forecast its sales. The Kaypro II had better succeed, since the half million in expenses didn’t include marketing costs and miscellaneous ones such as manuals—another million altogether. Kay, however, said the high-interest loans for the project “never really bothered me that much. I felt confident of getting it done. In one sense I place very little value on money. My wife, Mary, is quite different. She said, ‘You’ll lose your money.’ She was secretary of the company. She had to sign mortgages on our home that we had paid for, property we owned, the plant site. It was a heavy burden for her. If you’re in an airplane or car, going up a winding road on a mountain, the fellow who’s driving isn’t as nervous as if someone else is driving. I was involved in getting it done. She was on the sidelines worrying about it.”

The Kaycomp—that was the original name before the Kays changed it because it resembled another computer firm’s—first went public at a San Francisco computer fair in March 1982. Just a routine item appeared in Byte, the phone-book-sized microcomputer magazine. I wondered why. Maybe it was because Andy Kay’s technology wasn’t new, merely good repackaging, and he wasn’t selling himself as God or Henry Ford. But dealers at computer shows were raving. The Kaypro’s suggested retail price was $1,795, the same as the Osborne’s, and Kay, too, threw in software: a word processor, an electronic spreadsheet, and other programs that could have cost more than $1,000 if purchased individually. Kay was smart. Osborne had pioneered by including business software for “free” with an economy-priced machine, and now Kay must follow with its own “bundled” programs.

“Has Catch 22’s Milo Minderbinder, World War II’s greatest wheeler-dealer, hired on as a software buyer at NLS?” San Diego marveled.

“You don’t think that took a lot of time to put together?” Kay said. “We purchased some software outright and pay royalties for some.”[[11]]

By mid-1982, customers and dealers had placed several thousand advanced orders. Kay’s production lines cranked up, though the pace was slow at first as his people searched for bugs. They did not always stamp them out. A disk drive on my Serial #3083, lasted only a year; my warranty was for the industry’s usual ninety days. Moreover, despite visits to several dealers, my computer still streaked lightly across the screen when I typed, and finally I had to have the monitor replaced. But the view easily beat the Osborne’s. And later, modifying the circuitry and positioning the disk drives horizontally instead of vertically, Kay ended the streaks on new units. “In an emergency I get all the senior engineers on the job,” he said. “We don’t let problems go on like old man river.”

Andy Kay rewarded his top problem solvers with benefits like stock options, and the stock offering prospectus from Prudential-Bache Securities anticipated that in 1983 Kay himself would earn $187,000 in salary, bonuses, and other remuneration.

Not everyone fared so well; Kay said his labor costs were half those of competitors. “The wages on the line are so low,” quipped a disgruntled ex-employee, “I’d call them south of the border.” Kaypro was typical of many high-tech companies; the production workers were mainly women, many of them foreign born, some of them incapable of speaking English, all of them nonunion. Adam Osborne, too, tried to cut labor costs to the bone. And Atari had laid off scores of Americans and farmed out jobs to cheaper labor abroad, reddening the faces of the politicians known as “Atari Democrats” who believed that high tech could fight unemployment.

Regardless of the low wages, Kay’s own company at least appeared to be the antithesis of a sweatshop. His hillside buildings didn’t look like normal factories; they were long and narrow, well windowed, split into small rooms without the racket of mechanized production lines. Kay described his workers as “always moving, interacting constantly. If one piece is missing, they work around that. If one person is slow because he happens to be new, they work around him and help him out. It’s exactly the same approach we used for stuffing printed circuit boards on the voltmeters. It uses the least amount of capital equipment, and it’s the easiest on the assemblers, because they aren’t just sitting or standing in one spot.”

Lacking a conventional assembly line, Kay said he needed few mid-level managers; and even after Kay went public, he still hated to bring in MBAs. Managers built empires. They feuded. They got in producers’ way. That was how Kay felt, apparently—a legacy of the 1960s when Non-Linear Systems had splurged thousands on those seven vice-presidents and their white Cadillacs. But some practices from the go-go years lingered. One, said Kay, was participative management, the philosophy that had led to the formation of those small, friendly assembly teams. The atmosphere around the plant was informal. “We have very few written policies on anything,” he said. No dress code existed, save for an informal ban on attire like short shorts—a policy bent to accommodate workers who labored in the hot Southern California sun.