The Kaypro and I

It's 1983. My father has seen the future, and it is personal computing. I'm to discard my typewriter and buy the most sophisticated machine that I can lay my hands on. I ask the advice of my techie friends, all of them the future software and hardware designers of Silicon Valley.

And yet, I get a Kaypro. Even as I remove it from its box and set it up on my desk, I sense that I am not seeing the future. There is simply nothing futuristic about this machine: it is instantly retro, its shape at once Soviet and vaguely reminiscent of finned 1950s cars. And when the keyboard is attached to the front of the machine (for this is the special feature of the Kaypro, it is a "truly" portable computer because of its tanklike toughness) it looks like a bomb trying to inpersonate an air conditioner.

But it is a computer, my first, and my first introduction to word processing. For a long summer, the machine sits on a metal desk in the center of my co-op room, and I sit at the machine, processing words furiously. From time to time, my cockatiel tries to find its footing on the warm metal casing, and ends up flapping furiously and sliding off. The rabbit also hops up on the desk from time to time to drink from a bowl filled with just-born African ciclids, who respond either to the rabbit or the radiation emitted by the Kaypro by dying in dozens. Sometimes the rabbit kicks the Kaypro keyboard off the desk and it whacks into the wall, swinging on its cord. Friends and their friends climb in and out of the window behind the desk and use the computer as a community resource; sometimes I come home and my printer is printing out something written by someone I don't know.

But the Kaypro doesn't mind any of this: it is just as tough as its makers claimed it to be, and its green cursor flickers steadily, only blinking out in those moments when I have failed to save my data for several hours and am thus ripe to be taught a lesson. I use it, but I do not love it. I see it in the morning when I wake up and I am vaguely depressed, as if I had dreamed in the night that I would wake to find something glamorous on my desk, like an Apple Lisa. Still, it is my computer, for all of my undergraduate years. Eventually, I take to sneaking out at night to the computing labs at school to use the new Macintoshes that have mushroomed up in the middle of a swarm of slightly older PCs. The data is incomensurable, and my work is schizophrenic; pages written on one machine, pages written on another. I am secretly thrilled when I lend the Kaypro to a friend and it suddenly ceases working, as if I'd finally managed to break its heart with my abuse and neglect. I go to Berlin: It sits in the corner of a house in Palo Alto on a bit of green shag carpet, gathering dust.

Then, unexpectedly, the Kaypro is reborn. I come back from Berlin and give it to a friend who is desperate for a computer: he takes it to a store and swaps out the power supply. The machine is healthy again, unstoppable. It goes to Los Angeles, then on to New York, where my friend becomes a professional word-processor while writing a novel. Eventually, the novel winds up in a drawer and the Kaypro is pushed uncomfortably under a desk. Then one day -- this being Manhattan -- my friend places it on the stoop of his building, takes the requisite walk around the block, and when he comes back, to his relief, the Kaypro is gone. It is 1990.

In 1996, I go to a cafe in the East Village -- Alt.cafe -- and when I use the bathroom, I see that there is a bathtub in the bathroom and it is heaped with Kaypros, six or seven of them, as a sort of art installation. I am reminded of the famous anti-vivisection poem in which a young man goes into a dissection theatre, only to see that his own dog is on the operating table being flayed alive. I look at all those Kaypros, and wonder if they have been picked up on street corners, or in dumpsters. I examine them for signs of claw stratches or bird dung, but they remain as featureless as ever. Slightly queasy, I go back to my Powerbook, which I'd purchased only weeks before the newer model was released, a model that someone else in the cafe is using. I watch them typing on the sleeker, faster machine, and I am shamefully, completely, envious.

Last update: 11/1/02; 8:46:55 PM.