During World War II, he was a soldier in the Batalion Zośka of the Polish Home Army, and was awarded multiple times with a Cross of Valour.

After receiving a UNESCO award in 1960, he travelled for several years around the academic centres in the United States, including MIT, Harvard, Caltech, and many others.

His father, Adam 'Akar' Karpiński, was a prominent aeronautic engineer (who co-constructed the SL-1 Akar, the first glider constructed entirely by the Poles) and inventor, credited with projects of innovative climbing equipment (crampons, 'Akar-Ramada' tent).

Despite his young age (fourteen at the time), by pretending to be seventeen, he managed to join the Gray Ranks, a Polish underground paramilitary boy scouts organization, where he served in Grupy Szturmowe (Assault Groups).

In early 1943, he was severely injured while working on homemade bombs for an underground sabotage operation when one of them accidentally exploded in the basement of his house.

After the formation of the Home Army's Zośka battalion, Karpiński enrolled, where he befriended poet Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, both being commanders of smaller sub-units.

On the first day of fighting, he was trapped weaponless with around 30 other soldiers in a hospital building on Koszykowa street after the weaponry supply had been mistakenly directed somewhere else.

In his first years of work he experienced some minor vexations from communist security services (Urząd Bezpieczeństwa), due to his past in the Home Army.

[citation needed] Karpiński, just as many other former Zośka battalion veterans, influenced by former Home Army high officer Jan "Radosław" Mazurkiewicz's call, revealed himself to the Communists, but unlike many, he was spared imprisonment.

During the time Karpiński was planning to flee Poland, he even worked on designing a mini-submarine in which he would be able to cross the Baltic Sea and reach the Danish island of Bornholm.

Karpiński was asked by a long-time friend, Józef Lityński, an employee of the State Institute of Hydrology and Meteorology, whom he had known from his time in Radomsko, to build a device to help calculate Fourier integrals.

[7] The construction was also lauded for its aesthetical merits – the panel designed by leading Polish artists – Emil Cieślar, Olgierd Rutkowski, Stanisław Siemek and Andrzej Wróblewski had been considered to 'innovatively merge all functions in a congruent and attractive form that anticipated the future trends'.

[7] The machine has been domestically welcomed warmly, having been covered by a host of country-wide media, including national television TVP1 and Polish Film Chronicle.

During his stay he met with a number of leading computer scientists of the time including John Eckert, Claude Shannon and Edward F. Moore.

He convinced the director of the Institute of Automatics Stefan Węgrzyn to build a perceptron – a device built according to Frank Rosenblatt's ideas, able to learn how to discern and recognize objects and shapes.

Pniewski's team worked on the analysis of data from CERN – pictures from Glaser bubble chambers, traces of colliding electrons and neutrons.

With the help of newly formed team of seven people including later long-time cooperators Tadeusz Kupniewski and Teresa Pajkowska, Karpiński finished the machine in 1968, dubbed KAR-65, after three years of work.

The basis for the computer's construction was the fruit of the joint-venture agreement between the Polish state (represented by Metronex, a foreign trade office) and British private partners – companies Data-Loop and MB Metals.

[12] Karpiński collected a team of 113 employees, including programmers and hardware engineers such as Zbigniew Szwaj, Teresa Pajkowska, Andrzej Ziemkiewicz and Elżbieta Jezierska.

[13] Great emphasis was also put on its modularity – Karpiński was determined to build an entire system, with flexible complexity and arrangement in line with user's needs.

The primary objective was commercial, but Karpiński intended for K-202 to be used in a vast variety of applications – in industry, administration, science and military (land and navy).

Karpiński himself pointed at the intentional efforts of some high-level officials, mostly Jerzy Huk, director at ZPAiAP "Mera" [pl], a local computer engineering giant and monopolist, manufacturer of Odra mainframes.

[14] Another possible explanation for the lack of political will for Karpiński's case is the rise of the new, all-Comecon project of building a new family of computers within the communist bloc dubbed Riad.

Stefan Bratkowski point out that K-202 had the chance to succeed only as a part subjugated to the entire system, which Karpiński declined outright, considering the Riad project to be much inferior to K-202.

Karpiński found himself unable to find sufficient political backing, despite moderate support from the influential Franciszek Szlachcic and Józef Tejchma.

As a result, he lost his position within a project, which was swiftly rebranded as Mera 400 [pl] after very minor alterations (around 1% of functional content) and was not developed further, effectively ending the K-202's chances of commercial success.

Disappointed with the outcome of K-202 production, Karpiński in 1978 decided to move to the countryside near Olsztyn (village Dąbrówka Wielka) and started a small animal husbandry ranch.

[17] But the peak of his activity was reached during his trip to the United States, during which he amassed and passed an extensive amount of information on both the technological centres, but also personalities of American science and industry.

Historian Adam Kochajkiewicz claims his cooperation was heavily influenced by naivete on the situation in the scientific world and on the goals and methods of the intelligence.

[22] They, among them Maciej Sysło, underline the massive scale of funds and organization needed for the success of a new device and point out the uncertainty about the machine's real capabilities.