Hi friends:
I am looking for two things:
1) a Kaypro II keyboard
2) a DOS machine 386, 486, or Pentium preferably with a 5.25" floppy. A 3.5" floppy with that 5.25" would be a bonus but not needed. If it uses an AT keyboard then I will add that to my wish list. This can be a desktop or even one of the old machines, like Compaq's machine that looked like the Kaypro.
Please DM me if you have one you don't need.
cheers,
mark
Be careful, most of the Compaq machines that looked like a Kaypro are 8088 or at newest 80286 and probably won't run a lot of the things you want if your intent is a 386 or 486. By the time those processors became common the "luggable" suitcased size form factor was mostly dead.
You can find a lot of that 386-486 era machine on eBay if you look. A lot of people want silly high money for it though. I don't think I have anything older than Pentium level machines anymore and not very many of those but I never had any interest in MS-DOS orWindows really. I didn't take much interest in x86 hardware until 386BSD and then Linux came out around 1992-1993. I had a few earlier MS-DOS era machines that were mostly like dumpster rescues that I only used mostly for transferring between PC media and Macs or Apple II.
Thanks for the suggestions. That did give me something to think about. My goal is to be able to run software like a 22disk, image disc and teledisk to write floppies for my Kaypro and TRS-80
id also be interested in an internal 5.25" drive if anyone has one of those for sale.
I agree 100% the e in eBay now stands for expensive.
cheers
Watch out if you want to write floppies for most of the vintage 8 bit computers like Osborne, Kaypro or TRS-80 Model I or III that you want a DSDD 5.25" drive (360K), NOT at DSHD 5.25" drive (1.2M). The HD drives have a narrower head and while they usually read 360k disks OK, often they don't write disks that 360K drives will read reliably.
Here's the thing though... Most 286 and newer machines usually came with 1.2M 5.25" floppy drives. It is often possible to put a 360K drive into a newer machine if it has drive bays available but you may need to burn a slot for another controller card. What you are looking for is likely going to be tricky to do in just one machine. Make sure you do all your homework ahead of time otherwise you could get burned and have to buy additional stuff to make things work.
I literally know nothing about 22disk or teledisk so I can't help much on what the minimum CPU requirements are to use them. I just know about issues I ran into back in the day dealing with different sized floppies between systems.