Some showed 16 lines at one time. That wasn’t as many as the 24 on the Kaypro II screen, but enough for light-duty word processing. And soon others would do for the heavy-duty kind and a slew of additional uses. Thousands of traveling reporters and executives were already using the Radio Shack Model 100 introduced in 1983—despite its tiny built-in memory (no more than 24K in a typical configuration) and small screen (8 lines only 40 characters wide).
But where had Andy Kay hoped to get his first flat-screen model? From Mitsui & Co. in Japan, which would offer it to other U.S. companies, including perhaps some with marketing clout far greater than his. The Kays had thought they’d be the only people selling the note-book-sized computer. By late summer 1984, half a year after the original hoopla, Kaypro should have been shipping this miracle machine, but a spokesman in September could not even tell me if the Mitsui deal was still alive. Then word came out that the deal had fallen through and a flat screen Kaypro wouldn’t appear until 1985.
A rival company, Morrow, Inc.—headed by George Morrow, a witty, balding ex-grad student in math, one of Silicon Valley’s better hardware gurus—had meanwhile acted more successfully. In late 1984 it began marketing the Pivot, a ten-pound, $2,495 MS-DOS portable with one disk drive and a well-reviewed clone of WordStar called NewWord. And a revitalized Osborne—on the verge of escaping the Chapter XI bankruptcy proceedings—would soon sell its own version of the machine.
Data General, the mini-maker written up in the best-seller Soul of a New Machine, was another threat to Kaypro. In September 1984 it unveiled the Data General/One, which offered IBM compatibility, a built-in 737K floppy disk drive, and a 25-line flat screen. A software developer joked that the letters on the screen were so faint that the machine should be sold with a coal miner’s hat to read it. But eventually the flat screen would be just as readable as the Kaypro’s cathode ray tube. With the inevitable price drops and refinements, machines like the Pivot and the Data General/One would wreak havoc on Kaypro sales unless Kay retaliated with the right flat-screen portable of his own. IBM, AT&T, and Compaq, too, were designing their own flat-screen machines. And already Hewlett-Packard had been selling a $2,995 flat-screen computer with the popular Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program in Read Only Memory—permanent memory.
Another firm—Epson, a branch of Seiko, the giant Japanese conglomerate known for watches—was shipping a $995 computer with a compressed version of WordStar in ROM. The screen displayed only 8 lines of information at a time. But within months a 16-liner from NEC (formerly called the Nippon Electric Company) hit the market at the same price, complete with WordStar and built-in gadgetry for talking to other machines on the phone.
WordStar was now the only word-processing program offered free with the “luggable” Kaypros. If Andy Kay’s lap-sized micro couldn’t run it or a clone like New Word, he might be paving the way for some of his customers to buy rivals’ flat screens that did.
Most buyers used Kaypros to write or type. And how many would relish a switch to a new word-processing program?
And what about piping WordStar-composed letters and other documents from the luggables to the lap-size Kaypros? Customers could do so, but then they might have to insert new commands to tell their printers to underline or produce other special effects.
Beyond everything else, Andy Kay had better offer good software to fight rivals selling flat-screen machines similar to his. And WordStar over the years had generally been the most popular word processor for micros.