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TRS-80 Laptops Still Plugging Along
jfruhlinger writes: "The San Francisco Chronicle ran this story about the very first laptop, and the fact that it's still in use by non-hobbyists. It's biggest selling point is apparently its indestructable nature."
Yes that's it.
:-) ) I had understood almost every opcode and basically invented my own mnemonics for them. I wrote an disassembler to understand the ROM. Then an assembler (in BASIC), the helped me to write an assembler in assembler.
The model 100 was my first 'real' computer (I lived in a boat, so now way to get anything but a laptop) after a Sharp PC-1211 (A pocket calculator programmable in BASIC).
I still have it, nearly 20 years after, and it still works. It is hooked to my FreeBSD firewall.
The model 100 was an awsome machine. 80c85 processor (roughly equivalent to a Z80, without the extended opcodes) at something like 4Mhz, 32 Kb of ROM with a BASIC, a TEXT application, an ADDRess one, a TERMinal emulator. Mine also had 32Kb of RAM, which was huge.
Screen was 40x8 (320x64), the keyboard was a real keyboard, it run on 4 AA sized batteries, have an included modem (but not in the french version), came with a compuserve account. The arrow keys were very weak.
The rom was made by a little know software shop (Microsoft), which also made dev tools.
The machine have a Y2K bug (not the machine, but the Microsoft software), but, IIRC, one can get an eprom with a new patched ROM.
I learned hacking on that machine. I had no documentation, and lived in a place (a boat) were getting some was not an option. I did not know how to program in anything but BASIC. I noticed 3 basic function (PEEK, POKE and CALL), so I randomly PEEKed, POKEd and CALLed in the RAM ROM, and tried to guess what the numbers did. I had a book about the 6502 (a different microprocessor), so I knew the concept of register, stack, etc, etc.
In a few month (hint: I didn't had access to books, but I didn't have access to school either
I think I had too much time on my hands.
Cheers,
--fred
I've lost count of how many people I've talked to who would happily sacrifice slim size and light weight for some durability.
Heck, I've not bought any "new" (contemporary) test equipment for nearly 20 years. 99% of what I have is 80's-early 90's vintage stuff from Tektronix, HP, and other names like Cushman Electronics.
Sure, the newer stuff may have more bells and whistles, but try repairing or maintaining it yourself! Replacing surface-mount components, even assuming you can get the part, is no picnic. I know; I've done it!
I really think there needs to be a balance struck between the availability of high-tech hardware at a 'reasonable' price, and the ability to repair and maintain such hardware. The landfills are way too full as it is, and the motherboard in my main workstation just crapped out after only 2.5 years. If it had been designed and built PROPERLY, it should have lasted 25!
Yeah, I know... everyone wants plug-and-play, then throw-it-away, all for the sake of instant gratification and ultra-cheap prices. Well, guess what? You get exactly what you pay for!
Go ahead... mod this down if you want. I don't much give a rip...
Why, back in MY day, we transferred all of our important information on stone tablets, across our broken backs. We couldn't drive across the village. We had to walk, and sometimes that could take hours if we were carrying lots of data. Long lunch indeed! And we didn't even have soda, let alone cute receptionists...
And disks? We had mules! Ever see how stubborn those things are?
I still have a TI-74 BASIC-programmable calculator...which, I think, evolved from a prototype of a "portable computer" that TI showed around 1985, the Compact Computer 40. The CC-40 was never sold, but a lot of its design work seems to have filtered into the TI-74. (Mostly, my TI-74 gets used to balance my checkbook these days. :-). )
Eric
--
Be who you are...and be it in style!
Yes. That's the one.
--
Integer BASIC was Woz's handiwork. the later FPBASIC was a licensed port of Microsoft BASIC -- in fact, the ROM chip on my ROM1 IIgs has a "(C) MICROSOFT 77" message printed on it.
-lee
Yeah!
Best sig ever! Where else do you match far east proverbs with east-kentucky moon-shine singing folklore.
~^~~^~^^~~^
I own both the Tandy (in its European Olivetti-branded variant) and the Amstrad. The big plus of the Tandy are the display and the keyboard. Technically, the Amstrad is better - especially with a PCMCIA SRAM card -, and its much lower weight is also a big plus. I recently bought a foldable keyboard for my Palm, but found it a much less reliable and practical solution than the Armstrad.
Florian
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
--
...was using the cassette relay to do pulse-dialling when on holiday in portugal. The house we were staying in had a lock on the phone dial (and no DTMF back then!) so I broke out the line, hooked it through the cassette relay and played with timings in basic to get the pulse lengths right.
:)
Free phone calls
Hugo
AH he is correct. I was going to post about the Epson, which I saw again after many years at the MIT flea, with it's microcasette drive. I never owned an epson but did own both a model 100 and model 102, along with the acoustic coupled modem. I got a lot of wierd looks at phone booths in the mid 80s with it, especially considering how I looked (teenage punk). Which is probably not too wise considering what I was doing! Over the years, both computers managed to get Stolen. Shucks.
Either you've never connected to a BBS over a 300 baud connection, or you REALLY suck at typing. ;)
Then again, it's been about 15-17 years since I had to work over a 300 baud connection. How much of that slowdown was due to the actual connection speed (keep in mind most systems, even back then, would echo your characters back to you - halving the connection speed. Most BBS systems didn't rely on local echo), and how much was due to the system on the other end being roughly the same speed as yours and therefore a little overwhelmed, is a debatable question.
I had learned to touchtype a couple years earlier and was pushing around 60wpm, far less than 16cps, yet unless I used a terminal that had a line buffer characters would just go missing...
Moof!
Yeah, MS-Basic was in a lot of early micros, not just Commodore machines. But in general these were ports, not personally written by BillG himself.
Okay, I'm dredging up really old memories here, but wasn't that essentially the same critter?
No. The HX-20 was an entirely different design. It had a much smaller screen, built in printer, and had no built-in software except a BASIC interpreter.
The Espon HX-20 came out before the Model 100. Anti-Microsoft conspiracy buffs will note that the built-in software in the Model 100 was written by Bill Gates, so maybe that explains the revisonist history.
Panasonic has had a laptop line for as long as I can remember (= at least a couple years ;) that is geared specifically at being rugged. My last boss had one and would prove all the time just how tough it was-- I can remember him dropping it from ~5 feet, sliding it across a desk onto the floor, and even putting the fucker under the leg of his desk.
Panasonic did a demo for abc news at some recent computer show (pc expo maybe?) for their new model of this series where they actually ran over the fucker. I can't imagine how much more rugged I'd need my laptop to be...
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
Ah me too! My dad had one from work (he wrote DB software for waste treatment plant maintenance) and often brought it home and let me play with it. It's where I began my long journey....
The late Steve Holtzman told me that they used to do the same demo when he was selling machines for GRiD. Walk into the room, through the computer across the room, pick it up, turn it on, sell lots of machines. This worked especially well for military contracts.
mahlen
I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.
--Poul Anderson
OS/9 is a thoroughly kick-ass operating system. Linux kernel programmers could learn a *lot* from it.
It's a fully re-entrant, ROM-able, multitasking OS that can, in its minimal form, fit into 16K -- that's kilobytes, not megabytes -- of memory.
It has a device-independent driver system that completely obviates any need for programs to know anything about the device they are reading or writing to. The drivers are hot-loadable.
It's a helluva system. Well worth investigating.
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Man, now THAT was a cool machine.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
a beowolf cluster of these?
Getting spare parts actually wouldn't be that hard - it is built entirely from common components: 8085 cpu and discrete logic components. You can still get them from catalogs like Jameco.
The case and LCD may be a little harder to get, though. It's a good thing the case is nearly indestructible...
-
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
I suppose this old old machine which is older than many slashdotters still uses the standard RS-232 serial ports to do its interfacing to the outside world. It's one of the standards that has managed to endure, and it's probably only because this standard did endure that the TRS-80 laptops haven't died out. It's what allows you to use these Model 100's even in today's age. Without the ability to interface to the outside world no machine is worth beans.
I don't know, but I think maybe RS-232's days as a ubiquitous standard are numbered. I recently bought an IBM ThinkPad which doesn't have any RS-232 ports, only USB's, which have caused me a great amount of grief (and no small amount of money as well, I shelled out the equivalent of US$50 for a USB to serial converter, no small change out here in the Third World!) attempting to interface it with my Palm. Will this trend continue, I wonder?
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Specifically, he wrote the full-screen text editor. In assembly, I believe.
I was under the impression this was in 1979 (it's a reference from the book "Gates", which I haven't actually read but have seen excerpts from...) This says the sucker shipped in 1983. Did the product take a long time to come out...?
Rob
--
Meant COTS. My bad.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
You can purchase modern modems with acoustic couplers.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
My only wish is that the built in programming language was Perl instead of BASIC!
That'd be tough. The memory requirements for even a cut down Perl interpreter are pretty substantial. Also, since the scripts are compiled at run-time, it'd be really slow...
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
I have two of them that I use regularly. The twelve hour battery life can't be beat, and when they run out, you can use POTS batteries to replace them. Its a great device for writing, although the onboard memory is a bit small.
Since Christmas, I find myself using my Palm m105 and folding keyboard more and more often when I would've used the 102. Still, the 102 is a very useful device.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
Actually, OS-9 only ran on the Color Computer from Tandy, not the rest of the TRS-80s.
:-)
I used to have 3 floppy drives and a Heath H-19 terminal hooked up to mine. One drive was for the OS, one for the C compiler and one was for data (programs that I wrote). It was always very amusing to have two people using my computer at once; one on the terminal and one at the "console". All this at a time when the PC was still running DOS 2.x. Not bad for Tandy's little toy computer!
I work at a school that gets donated quite a lot of old hardware. We've had 3 or so laptops given to us, a compaq 386 sx25, some kind of old toshiba, and an 8086 laptop, the brand and model of which I've forgotten.
.. I learnt batch file programming and all that jazz on it =)
The only one still working is the 8086 one. The only reason it stands out in my memory is that my father had one when he was working at mobil, and it was the first PC I actually used
They don't make 'em like they used to?
Really? I've never used one =)
.. it was too long ago) drive that it had =)
It doesn't make sense... 300 / 9 = 33.333 (8 data bits + one stop bit)
it wouldn't have been higher latency, for some reason, rather than typing faster than the modem?
[ot] there used to be a bbs 'round here running on a C64, with a 300 baud modem. Apparently the modem was faster than the floppy (or maybe tape
I have a PCjx sitting in my room... small black desktop case, tiny cga screen, etc... looks really cute.
.. they're really rare even on new PCs. On the other hand, the keyboard had to be pointing straight at the screen, and you occasionally got garbage if the connection was cut.
2x 3.5" 360k(not a typo) floppy drives, infrared keyboard, 2x rom cartridge drives
I'm amazed at the infrared keyboard though
but it was still a cool toy, until my cousins borrowed it and broke the screen somehow. I keep meaning to open it up and fix it, but haven't gotten around to it yet. It'd probably be hard to replace, too... it's a 15 pin joystick-sized plug, rather than the ordinary 9pin cga type.
ah well.
"The fastest modem connection the Tandy can support is 19,200 bps, sluggish compared with today's DSL and cable modems. (It comes with something even more pokey: a built-in 300-bps modem that sends text more slowly than the average person can type.)"
;]
I dunno about you guys, but I sure can't type 33 characters per second
(assuming an N81 connection)
I believe the MS-BASIC included with Workbench V1.1 (?) was dumped for a non-MS AmigaBasic from v1.2 (but don't quote me on that... it's been a long time).
Mr. Gates was too busy sending letters to hobbiests complaining about code theft to do any actual work.
Mr. Gates was too busy sending letters to hobbiests complaining about code theft to do any actual work.
Paul Allen was the smart one; he's the one that did most of the BASIC programming, AND the cloning of CPM into MSDOS.
Gates was his BUISINESS partner, charged with making sure they would make money. Gates himself is incapable of any real contributions to software, other than to rip off other's work and peddle it as his own.
Want proof? Tell me if this reads more like the work of a HACKER or the work of a pathetic, money grubbing, whiney, "we have the God given right to make a profit anyway we want" PHB:
Quote:
By William Henry Gates III
February 3, 1976
An Open Letter to Hobbyists
To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market?
Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.
Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.
What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on hobby software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at.
I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.
Bill Gates
General Partner, Micro-Soft
When I was in 1st grade ('81) and supposed to be learning to read my teachers and my parents were very concerned because Jane and Spot and Dick were _not_ running and at the rate I was going they were not really even crawling. It was Christmas time and Mom and dad talked to me and they told me I was going to a different school when the new year started (to a class for those with learning disabilities.)
Santa brought us a TI-99/4A that Christmas and it came with a couple of joysticks and a speech synth (I had wanted an Atari, like the neighbors had). At the time, most of my waking thoughts were dedicated to the wonders of C3PO and R2D2. I knew that I could not make a robot but I thought that perhaps I could make the TI-99 talk to me. I spent all of that vacation pouring over the BASIC programming manuals and mostly I drew diamonds, hearts and turtles on the screen and made it beep. Most of this time was away from my folks and one night after a particularly frustrating day trying to find the documentation for the speech synth. I brought the BASIC reference manual (w/ Picture of Bill Cosby on the back) to my Dad and asked him what was the meaning of the word "Syntax."
Dad: Rob, where'd you hear that word?" .......
Me: I read it in the book, dad.
Dad: No, Rob, you can't read that. Who told you that word?
Me: Really, dad, I read it right here, "SIN-tax," what does it mean? Syntax Error?
Dad: Sylvia! Get over here! Rob, read some other words on the page to me.
Me: Dad, I just wanna know what it means. I keep seeing it when the type-a-writing is wrong.
Dad: What do you mean? Type-a-write?
Me: How do I type-a-write, so I can make the computer talk?
I stayed in my regular classes and from then on mom and dad taught me to read.
As a kid, I always wondered what was the purpose of the funny character that - produced... now, I see... of course! Yen!!
:-)
So, minor correction: aside from the badging, there was probably *no* difference from the Sharp model
Part of the Second American Revolution!
... was on a TRS-80 "Pocket Computer" of my Dad's. They came out at the same time as the Model 100 laptop, and were about 8 x 3.5 inches rectangle, 0.5 in. thick, and had one line of LCD display.
:-)
My Dad still, to this day, uses that TRS-80 Pocket Computer. It sits on his desk next to an IBM RS/6000 CAD workstation. Hey says it's very handy for entering & solving calculations, and the steel casing is very durable -- he takes it onsite to industrial plants all the time.
Radio Shack used to be such a cool hobbyist computer store... they even came out with a tiny, very quiet, thermal printer and a cassette tape drive for the Pocket Computer.
I believe that Dad's TRS-80 still has my first-ever program in its tiny little memory: a loop that beeps and prints "I love you, Dad!" (cut me some slack, I was in 5th grade at the time
Part of the Second American Revolution!
No kidding. I spent a while typing in an ELIZA-style program once into our 99/4A. It ran, and it worked... but you'd type in something, then sit back and wait 30 seconds for it to say something like, "Go on." :->
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Heh, I've got "The Complete Rainbow Guide to OS-9 Level II, Volume 1: A Beginners Guide to Windows" sitting on my bookshelf here.
I learned a lot from OS-9. It showed me what an OS could be.
load "linux",8,1
Ah, you had the later double-density floppy drive. My first two TRS-80 drives were single side, single density and stored (as I recall) about 63k. If you had a single floppy system the OS took up about 50k of that, so you had maybe 11-12k for programs and data. You -needed- that second floppy drive!
The disk drives had a circle of black bars printed on the drive motor's hub. You were supposed to adjust the drive rotation speed by staring at the image under a flourescent light and turning an adjustment with a screwdriver; when the image of the bars stopped flickering, the drive was rotating at the correct speed. No, I am NOT making this up...
Buying floppies was an adventure in which you felt good to get 8-9 good floppies out of a box of 10 on a really good day. You had to choose between hard- or soft-sectored disks, single or double sided, and single or double density, and all combinations of the above, and just try finding a store which even knew what a floppy disk was, let alone carried the particular version you needed. Lord, I do NOT miss those days :)
After the Model 100/102/200 series came a group of "Laptop" computers similar to the market-leading Toshiba's of the day. The last of the line (or at least, the last one I kept track of,) was a little clamshell design with a 20 MB hard drive and Tandy's attempt at a DOS based GUI loaded over it (I forget what they called it -- it wasn't bad, actually.) I've still got a Model 100 and a Model 1400FD laptop down in the basement somewhere. They both still work. In earlier days the Model 100 was my doorbell controller: when you pressed the doorbell button the Model 100's screen lit up and presented a math problem. If you answered the problem correctly then the doorbell rang, if not you got to try again and the problem got harder. I have to keep the 1400FD laptop, though: out in the shop they have an old one running a labeling machine for plastic caps and mine is the backup in case that one ever fails. *sigh*
Solitaire...
The reason Microsoft succeeded in the business market.
PPK = Polizei Pistole Kurtz?
--
I wrote a CP/M BIOS that would bank-switch over to the normal address space and call the built-in ROM to do I/O. You had to buy the disk drive expansion kit, of course.
We had this weird idea that we could sell it. No clue what we were doing, but it was fun.
Back in the days when I'd see Bill regularly (1988-1993 or so), I discovered that mentioning the Model 100 would always put him in a good mood. I had earlier done some work with the NEC PC-8201A, which is the same computer under the manufacturer's brand. He was so darn happy about how they squeezed such a good implementation of BASIC into that machine. Now I wonder if that's why Bill referred consulting customers to me and was so friendly... I didn't realize that it was the last thing Bill personally worked on until much later, when I mentioned it to Tom Corrdry, who worked at Microsoft before it was Microsoft.
While it's good to see this story on the record, now *everybody* knows my secret to putting Bill in a good mood. Well, if our paths cross again, I'm sure he'll remember that I was praising hte Model 100 long, long ago.
I still have two 8201As in my closet. Wonder if they're worth something.
Nick
IIRC the Model II had 8" drives. The Model 4 had dual 5-1/4" units, and was also available in a portable version, the 4P. I managed to buy the first 4P to appear in Key West FL that had a real "green" screen; spent many happy hours hacking Z80 assembler on that little beast.
WinSCP allows one to use SCP in a two pane filebrowser with the local hard drive on the left and the remote machine on the right. That can be had from:
p pl et.html
a l/ mindterm_downloads.html
http://winscp.vse.cz/eng/
Mindterm also has a two pane SCP utility built into it. Being a java app, it looks the same on either Mac, Windows, or Unix. It didn't work too well for me with Kaffe but it works great with the Blackdown JVM. You can try it as a browser applet at:
http://www.appgate.org/products/mindterm/demo/a
You can download precompiled jar files and source from:
http://www.appgate.org/products/mindterm/person
I recommend these to my Mac and Windows using friends to pull files from my cable modem connected server. Time/Warner has never hassled me about ssh like they do www and ftp and these clients make it dead easy for my buddies.
With MindTerm, remember to open a ssh command shell first then open the File menu to get the SCP browser. WinSCP is a SCP browser only.
Quite good actually. Many of the teachers I work have have Macs of various description at home and they usually are four years old or more. The build quality of a typical piece of Mac hardware is comparable to the better PC components. Think Asus mobo versus the ones that come from fly-by-night Korean companies.
If you really want your Mac to last five more years then it probably can be done. My best advice for you is to keep the inside of the machine clean. It has internal fans and ghost turds will accumulate in there. Also, like most modern PC hardware, it isn't terribly tolerant of low quality noisy power. Get a good UPS for it.
I must point out that you can probably expect the hard drive and maybe the floppy drive to succumb to some mechanical failure. There are a lot of crap Seagate drives in Apples of that era. The rest of the machine will probably keep on truckin' if you're nice to it.
Well, I can't argue with most of your comment. You obviously had more patience than I with the TI. I pretty much lost interest when I found out about it's built-in limitations
I will address the TMS9918 problem. Yes, you are right, it was never supported on the motherboard. I never claimed it was. I was, however, involved in a development project that required video overlay. The chip of choice was the TMS9918 because it was the only one on the market that even claimed the ability. A great deal of engineering went into trying to make it work. It wasn't until after much communcation with TI and TI realized enough of a demand that they finally released an updated version that the overlay and genlock actually worked. If you managed to get it to work on a TI-99/4A then you must have gotten one late in the game that had the updated chip.
It was my understanding that the TI-99/4A was no longer being sold when the update was released.
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satire, n: 1) witty language used to convey insults or scorn; 2) a form of humor lost on most slashdot moderators.
Rockwell 6809 processor
Uhh.. no. Motorola 6809 processor. The heart of the CoCo. And, yes it blew the sh*t out of every processor on the market at the time for computing power. The Rockwell nee Commodore nee MOS 6502 blew the sh*t out of everything for speed.
All the serious arcade games were based on the 6502 (some even had one CPU per CRT color gun in color games)
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satire, n: 1) witty language used to convey insults or scorn; 2) a form of humor lost on most slashdot moderators.
You are close:
I think they were originally sold for $400. I bought mine for $200. It wasn't until they realized these things just weren't catching on that they sold them for the cut-rate $99.
The video overlay feature in the TMS9918 never worked until an updated version was released well after the TI-99/4A was long dead.
Additionally, although the TMS9900 was a 16 bit processor in an 8 bit world, The TI-99/4A was a pig in that, as you said, the 16k "stock" RAM was attached to the video controller; the CPU had no direct access to it. All memory I/O was through a port on the video controller.
On top of that, the cartridges and the built in BASIC ROM were all serial ROMS, accessed only a bit at a time.
Further, the scratch memory and all expansion peripherals were choked down to 8 bit wide access.
It could have been a really cool machine if it hadn't been so horribly cobbled by it's design.
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satire, n: 1) witty language used to convey insults or scorn; 2) a form of humor lost on most slashdot moderators.
Very true, but there was a cartridge available with 'Extended BASIC', which was a big improvement.
I don't remember very well, but I thought you could use only 8 sprites simultaneously. Am I wrong, or was it maybe a software limit?
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
Isn't everything from Microsoft delayed?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
The contest was rigged, Microsoft had coded in a special toolbar button for "hello world".
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
"I don't remember very well, but I thought you could use only 8 sprites simultaneously. Am I wrong, or was it maybe a software limit?"
No, you could use 32 sprites. But you could only use 8 at a time on the same row, any more would cause some sprites to become clear in parts. The Colecovision had a simular chip with the same problems.
I wasn't quite old enough to get a TRS-80 when they were new. I acquired one from my father's friend, who was cleaning out his garage, in 1992. It was still clean--pure white, and had all manuals.
I learned to program in BASIC on it (actually I had been programming in Turbo Basic on my school's XT a year previously but wasn't very good at it).
In 1994, I gave it to my sister's friend's brother, because he wanted to learn about computers, and I had my flashy new 386SX-16. So I gave it to him.
I don't know which model it was, but it had two 5.25 inch floppy drives and a white monochrome screen. If you held down a certain key while booting, it would load BASIC from ROM. It had even came with a Radio Shack tape deck and Radio Shack blank tapes.
Hello little man. I will destroy you!
Sci-Tec instruments (now kipp & zonen) used them as embedded computers to control a lot of tank gauging equipment all across the Canadian prairies. Awesome things, they are still going.
I managed to buy two of them off Sci-Tec for $10 a piece back in 1995, and used them all throughout University to take notes. Much superior to a "real" laptop, they were smaller, lighter, had a rocking battery life and an awesome keyboard. 32K of RAM stored about a week's worth of notes, easy to transfer with a null modem cable. Several times I even used the built in 300 baud modem to transfer my notes from the lounge at school.
I bought 2 because I figured I'd need one for spare parts. After all, they were heavily abused and about 10 years old. Hah. They're still going strong. Every once in a while I still throw it in my knapsack when I want to type something up in the middle of the park.
Bryan
The best feature of the TRS-80 is that the second you press the power button, you're ready to go to work. Computers of today still don't have that capability. Kinda makes you rethink the definition of "obsolete".
I still have my Model 200 -- functionally the same as the Model 100, but with a bigger, flip-up screen and more memory IIRC. Indestructible is indeed the word for these things (and the battery life is terrific...) I used to use mine as a portable terminal for amateur packet radio. I don't do much of that any more but my Model 200 still sits on a shelf above my electronics workbench, next to an RS-232 breakout box. I typically use it as a terminal when I'm hacking hardware with a serial port interface... most recently when I was fixing a Sony laserdisc player I found in a dumpster. I expect I'll have uses for the thing as long as there are devices out there with RS-232 interfaces...
kiscica
Step up and take credit. You just know he reads /.
And you are broke why?
<approximate quote>
The lids open to give access to storage space for people on the move. The TRS-80 model can easily hold a notebook, calculator, appointments diary, pens and pencils, and still have enough room for a lunchtime sandwich. The larger (Osborne) can in addition accomodate a change of shirt and underclothes for an overnight stay.
Great care has been taken over verisimilitude. Several of the keys on the TRS-80 are designed to easily fall off, and its "LCD" has several permanent black spots, while the (Osborne) is just slightly too large in all dimensions to easily fit in the luggage rack or under the seat in airline coach-class, and has built-in weights placed so as to make it difficult to carry and manoevre without frequently hitting or chafing the user's shin.
</approximate quote>
A little unfair on the TRS-80, perhaps, but pretty accurate for the first generation of luggables.
I still use my Sinclair Z88 for long train journeys, great wee machines, also run on 4 x AA batteries which mean you can keep powered up by nipping into any corner shop or supermarket when you need more juice...
Anybody else still running one?
i found this picture, is that it?
-Jon
this is my sig.
Yah, my IIIxe and PPK fill the niche of the laptop I don't have - writing.
Actually, I just converted some html and css files to docs, and I'm going to try to do some coding on my Palm on the train. Now all I need is a full-featured browser for the Palm and I'm set....
But isn't the keyboard great? Wheee.
-jKarma: T-rexcellent.
I've tried to teach my thinkpad 600E to fly a number of times (the power cord occassionally gets wrapped around my leg)... The first time it did a perfect 180-degree spin, the screen cleanly snapped shut on hitting the chair, and it did a perfect four-point landing on the floor (which was about as hard as concrete). It still worked (generally), but the hard drive started to act up, so it was replaced a few weeks later. I tried again a few weeks ago, and it didn't suffer any consequences this time. But you're right, I can't imagine throwing the thing to someone across the room..
---
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Yeah, we all get the joke, but it may be of some interest to younger /. readers that there was a unix-like OS for the TRS-80 line of computers, though I don't think you could use it until the Model II or so with 32KB of ram. It was OS-9 with some info here.
:)
It was a bear to work with though from what I remember. You like normal then loaded OS-9 and it took over the machine. Then you would load commands in to memory for use, kind of like a memory mount. Then you would have to constantly, it seemed anyway, swap disks to get everything you needed, though having 2 disk drives could help a lot. I didn't have enought money to spring for that HUGE 20 meg hard drive.
It was neat though, had an assembler, C compiler, BASIC compiler, and even pascal I think. Though I was young at the age, I do remember having to use it to run Infocom's Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
Free Online Woodworking Resources Directory
That's why I said "almost."
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
... they'd get almost as much functionality as the TRS-80, plus Solitaire!
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Those were fun. I got mine(since given to my brother when I joined the Marines) salvaging during bulk trash season. You'd be surprised at all the cool working stuff people trash. My first TV(first two or three actually) was from that, I got a set of golf clubs, all sorts of stuff... I wish they had something like that out here in california. Technically salvaging from trash piles was illegal, but the cities enforcement policy was this "If the property owner complains, we will send the cops." Otherwise, there was NO enforcment. I've been digging through piles with a cop car driving by and had no problems... those were the days.
Since the TRS-80 BASIC, the last recorded instance of Bill Gates writing any code was when Visual Basic was launched. As a publicity stunt, Bill, using Visual Basic, went up against a bunch of tech journalists, who were allowed to choose their language. They (Gates & the journalists) were given a task to implement, and the person who completed a working solution first "won".
Luckily for Microsoft, Gates beat the journalists, coding in the new Visual Basic. The guy hadn't coded for over a decade.
Microsoft products may suck, but at least Bill can code. When he isn't writing snotty letters and fending off hordes of US Government Lawyers.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Firstly, he beat a bunch of tech journalists. That's like being impressed if an NBA coach beat a bunch of local sports beat writers at making free throws.
;)
Um, not really. Certainly back then, and even in todays "modern" world, a fair number Tech Journos are certainly able to code. We're not talking Jon Katz style "journalists" remember.
Secondly, do you REALLY believe that Gates didn't do some coding before hand
Of course he did. Wouldn't you? Whats that got to do with it anyway, the others who were coding against Gates had probably writen code before the contest as well.
Thirdly, I bet you that the task was hand-picked to highlight VB's qualities.
According to the reply above, I may be wrong about it being VB, and it may in fact have been QuickBasic. If thats the case, then the tasks that could have been set would have be fairer matched. Personally, i'm still fairly sure it would have been Visual Basic as a) Microsoft had been writing BASIC interpreters since day one, and Quick Basic was just an extension of the original MBASIC & b) BASIC is just BASIC, and Microsoft wanted to show off their new "Visual Paradigm" no doubt.
Anyway, I'm not trying to be a Microsoft apoligist, just adding some historical flavour to this discusion. Personally I can't stand Microsofts products, and I run Mandrake 8.0 at home, and hack on applications for AtheOS when I have the time. I just like ancient-history
Syllable : It's an Operating System
I wish my laptop could withstand that kind of abuse. I given the occasional computer a well-placed whack (usually to quiet down a fan I couldn't immediately attend to), but I can't imagine throwing my laptop to the floor as a demonstration. Are we taking a step backwards settling for these high-resoluton LCD models?
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
I guess the iPAQ got instant on right :) It helps to never turn off in the first place heh.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
The TRS 80 was actually made by NEC, who marketed an almost identical machine under their own name, the NEC 8201, without the internal modem. Had mine online from the WisconsinState Capitol's guide desk for the 2 weeks we had a sit-in over investments in Apartheid South Africa.
Ben Masel: 51,282 votes for US Senate in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary
IIRC Portland Oregon is the home to the only active TI user group around. And yes, they have a great website for all your 99er needs.
Hell yes. I also remember the importance of writing about ten copies of anything that you wanted to be able to recover again because the damn tapes were so unreliable. What I really remember, though, is when we first got a floppy drive for the thing and thinking about how the 180 K that you could get on a SS/DD 5 1/4" diskette was so huge. Of course it's still impressive how much you can cram into 180 K today, if anyone actually tried to do so.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
In 1992 I interviewed Mr Gates for ABC Radio (Australia). I asked him if he did any programming any more and he said the last thing he actually coded himself was part of the basic in the Tandy Model 100.
We (the two best nibbles players) used to play 2-player mode projected on the wall for the amusement of the rest of the students.. :) .*shrc is
--
$HOME is where the
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
link with pic and stats. I still have one of these (somewhere in a box) at home! .*shrc is
--
$HOME is where the
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
But it didn't look anything like the kind of laptops you see today. It had a four-line character-based LCD, and was fun as hell to play with. Every Radio Shack around that time had one...and it was nifty just to type on. Nowadays we'd use a Palm or a Visor for the sort of things you'd do on one of those, but I can see why you'd want a full-sized keyboard, BASIC, and a piece of near-indestructable hardware for the uses these old guys are seeing.
These suckers were pretty close to indestructible, too.
They were among the first "notebook" laptops made -- that is, in an 8.5"x11.5" form factor. 16 shades of gray VGA at 640x480, 286 processors, 1MB of RAM, and 20MB of hard disk space.
I had one for ten years. The only reason I gave it up was because it somehow ended up under my bedpost -- not very good for the LCD screen.
Anyhow, I remember PC Magazine ran an "abuse" test on several notebooks around this time (although I think they used the 386 model). They poured coffee on 'em. They dropped 'em from a height. They did all sorts of crazy things to them. In the end, the Sanyo design (also sold by Zeos and Everex) was the only laptop to remain functioning after all this abuse.
It was a great machine. And I hope this Athlon desktop I'm using now will last ten years as my music studio machine, too.
Ciao!
Eighteen years have come and gone; entire industries have risen and fallen; innumerable tons of computers have been consigned to the scrap heap.
If you want to see a Lisa or a PCjr, you'll have to visit a computer museum.
But about a million of the Tandy laptops are still in use, on factory floors and whale-watching boats; by reporters on assignment and researchers in Antarctica.
A sturdy 6-pounder, the Model 100 looks more like a Speak & Spell toy than a state-of-the-art computer.
It didn't have aluminum, titanium or Pentium anything. There was no GUI; it wasn't WYSIWYG. It ran 16 hours on four AA batteries.
You turned it on, you typed, you sent your words over phone lines at a glacial 300 bps. It cost $799 for 8-Kb version; $1,134 for the 32-Kb version.
And it was a big hit. It could lay claim to being the first true laptop. The only previous "portable" computer was the 24-pound, suitcase-size Osborne, which came out in 1980.
Tandy, with headquarters in Fort Worth, sold 6 million units of the Model 100, and its slimmer, higher-memory brother, the Model 102. In the late '80s, the original laptop was displaced by machines that ran Microsoft Windows, but somehow the Tandys didn't go away.
In the fast-forward culture of the digital age, where every gadget is nearly obsolete before you peel out of Fry's parking lot, the Model 100 and 102 laptop stand out for their staying power.
"It's one of those machines that immediately becomes your friend," said Rick Hanson of Pleasant Hill.
Hanson, whose vanity license plate reads LAPTOP, has certainly become a close buddy of the 100 and 102. For years he has run the user group Club 100 (www.the-dock.com/club100.html); he repairs, refurbishes and sells the vintage laptops as a sideline.
His workshop is a tinkerer's delight, crammed floor to ceiling with neatly stacked model car kits and computer components. One shelf holds two dozen Model 102s that he is fixing for reporters at the Los Angeles Times.
Talking a mile a minute, he grabbed a few simple components off the shelves.
"Let's throw a 102 together," he said, laying down the plastic base, then rapidly slipping in a motherboard, switch sliders, a cardboard insulator, the LCD screen, the keyboard and the top.
He switched the machine on, displaying its simple roster of software: a text editor, telecom package, schedule book, address book and BASIC.
Hanson lifted it above his head, and, chuckling at the expression on visitors' faces, flung the laptop onto the floor. It bounced a little; he scooped it up and dropped it once more for good measure. Then he switched it on: Everything sprang back to life, as good as new.
"You can throw it across the room, let it land on concrete, and it'll still work," he said. "Try that with your new laptop."
That hardiness has endeared the "Model T" to people who really need a resilient computer.
Ascii artist &
Nice article. I used to really want one of those when they came out, but I was on the dole and couldn't afford it...
Of course, the really cool thing about this article is that people are using this old hardware to do a job.
Not because it's 'Kewl', 'l33t', or Retro-Chic, but because they do the job required and can cope with the conditions under which the job is done.
Now that is far cooler than geeks farting about.
Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems
"Information wants to be paid"
From the article:(It comes with something even more pokey: a built-in 300-bps modem that sends text more slowly than the average person can type.)
Can you type at a sustained 300bps? I don't think I could keep it up, and I type faster than "most people".
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
I don't know which model it was, but it had two 5.25 inch floppy drives and a white monochrome screen. -----> If it was an integrated unit, it sounds like a Model II to me.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
POTS = Plain, Off The Shelf
I recall quite fondly my TRS-80 days (although it was a Model I); Loading and saving programs via cassette tape, those little stars winking.
...
BLoad... BSave... heh heh
The face of a child can say it all, especially the mouth part of the face.
Please remember that serial communication actually has a start bit also ... So its 1+8+1 = 10 bita = 300/10 = 30 cps or as it where more used at that time (7bit even 2) 1+7+2 = 10 = 300/10 = 30 cps
"TRS-80 Laptops Still Plugging Along"
Wait...I thought the point of laptops is that they were unplugged. Nevermind.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
On Man or Astro-man?'s (great space rock surf combo from Georgia) latest albumn, entitled "A Spectrum of Infinite Scale" they have a song made with dot matrix printers. The song is called "A Simple Text File" and is pretty cool considering what it is created on. Check it out next time you are in a mp3 pirating, ahh, I mean downloading the mp3's you own for backup reasons mood. Also check out their web page.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
You mean it uses ones and zeros, too?
-cibrPLUR
I downloaded a program for the TRS-80 CoCo that would let you receive (I don't remember if it could transmit) TTY using the cassette port. I'd load the program, connected the input sound plug to the earphone jack of my IC2-AT (a great ICOM 2M handheld from the early '80s) and off I'd go. No extra hardware required. The cassette port was actually a pretty good D/A converter that could do more than just save data and programs to tape.
DE WB3IZT
Beware of Sleestak
No, but for those of you who HAVEN'T had the pleasure of using a 300 bps modem, you really can type faster than it-that's because the majority of the time, the remote host is sending a lot data to you for display, to which you send only a small number of keystrokes back.
So while you can't type faster than 300 bps physically, you certainly will end up waiting for the modem quite a lot of the time, especially on any sort of prompt/command interface and as a result, the modem feels really slow. :)
Calum
I like the picture on the front page of the article... Rick Hanson drops the TRS-80 from about three feet (approx a meter for those of you who've advanced far beyond us Americans by using the Metric system)... click the thumbnail at the top of the article.
I'd do this with my ThinkPad once, and then would have to think about it a while before doing so. I would survive, but there'd definitely be some superficial damage.
Now, how many times do you think Mr. Hanson has done that particular demonstration (actually, how many times do you think he did it for Carolyn Said (the reporter))?
"They very seldom need repair." -- Cathleen Cox
I'd hope so, I wonder how hard it is to get spare parts.
And, for those of you who don't read the article...
The laptop's lore is good for some nifty trivia questions. For example: Who wrote the Model 100's software? Answer: Bill Gates.
Most people in windows use CRT for telnet (or secureCRT for ssh). The easiest way to transfer files is still Zmodem over an ssh/telnet connection (no extra protocol or path-typing as with scp or ftp).
ZModem still rules.
I remember my 300bps days on an Apple IIe, connecting to GEnie. (Anyone remember that? :)
I was frequently waiting for the display to catch up to me. I certainly wasn't typing 30 cps, I was likely typing around 5cps (60 to 70 wpm), and between occasional resends due to line noise and all the data coming back in response, you will be waiting. Don't forget that for every character you typed, you would be getting that character back, plus any ANSI color, etc.
All I wanted was a rock to wind a piece of string around, and I ended up with the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota
30 cps, don't forget the start bit as well. 300 / (1 start + 8 data + 1 stop) = 30.
Heh. Remember speed tweaks for 300 baud?
300 / (1 start + 7 data + 0 stop) = 37.5
Back then there was no need for anything greater than 128 ASCII characters.
Of course, with an acoustic-coupled FSK modem, handshaking was non-existant and Mom would break the silence by calling you for dinner. Her voice would always leak past the seal around the telephone handset and interrupt the 2 hours you'd already devoted to downloading *one* GIF. So keeping the stop bit probably wasn't much of a performance penalty if it helped with stability. 33.3cps. Wow.
Then again, that was lightning fast compared to the DEC LA-36 teletype and 110 baud modem that someone gave me when I was about 12. At the time, there were rules about not connecting anything but phone company property to telephone lines, so acoustic coupled modems were de rigeur. I even remember seeing an acoustic couple 1200 baud once. My 110 baud modem was junked Bell Telephone equipment, so it was apparently exempt from the telephone line rules, and I used it when I didn't want to be interrupted. That was the slowest thing in the world. But when you were reading your e-mail (on 17" wide paper!), at least there was _never_ any spam. You could put your e-mail address up on your Archie server, or even post it in newsgroups, and there was never any spam.
[hums theme from All In The Family]
Every now and then, I'll fire up my old VT-100 and login to my FreeBSD box. I'll use vi at 300 baud just for the nostalgia.
Got a job for a Toronto computer geek who used to have a UUCP e-mail address? Click here!
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I was, however, involved in a development project that required video overlay. The chip of choice was the TMS9918 because it was the only one on the market that even claimed the ability.
Well, we have to make a distinction here, then. Was there a suffix on the chip number?
I assure you, once you use a sync separator circuit and recombine it into the video stream, the TMS9918ANL, which was the version in every TI-99/4A (as opposed to the TMS9918 in the /4), the video overlay works just fine. I've even done it on a variety of consoles, including the older black and aluminum ones.
Early problems I had were having the video bleed through the solid overlay colors. It was easily fixed by reducing the video gain using (urk) a potentiometer. I did this after the sync separator/recombiner stage because I guessed that if I was overdriving the video (white clip and bleed-thru), I was probably overdriving the sync.
The TMS9918ANL - which was the chip in every TI-99/4A I've ever seen - never so much hiccupped. Unless the VCR was mistracking... the TMS9918 was pretty strict about timing, and could't lock very far away from normal fh and fv.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Is there someone using that? Because my brother smashed mine with a hammer.
Not the PEB or the expansion cards!
Having worked on a lot of industrial and military computer systems, I have yet to see another computer that has cast aluminum cases around its expansion cards.
32k of RAM in a cast aluminum card.
And that was mounted in a card cage that is stamped of thicker steel than the side impact beams in a Ford Explorer. (No kidding.)
The TI-99/4A came with a really bad BASIC. TI-BASIC was interpreted at runtime into "GPL" - Graphics Programming Language. It was a TI proprietary language that was used for most cartridges and stuff.
TI had decided in 1979, when they released the predecessor, the TI-99/4, that home users wouldn't be interested in programming, so BASIC was poor, and an Assembler wasn't available until 1981. TI also thought that they'd sell the consoles for $99 each, at a loss, and make their profits on the peripherals.
The processor was the same TMS9900 that was used in Patriot guided missiles. It was a real 16 bit CPU at a time when everything else had 6502s. They were really cool, too, because the CPU registers weren't actually on the CPU - they were in RAM. "Workspace Pointers" pointed to the location in RAM, and you could do a lot of really neat early multitasking tricks by using a routine called from the video interrupt to move the workspace pointer to a different location and therefore change your context in about 3 CPU cycles, versus the time it would take to move the information in all those registers. No protected mode, though. :(
All the stock RAM was addressed through the video controller, a TMS9918, which had really cool features like 32 automatic sprites and a video overlay and genlock feature that TI never used in the home computer. The shared RAM was cheap at a time when 16K of RAM was a lot of money, and they felt no one would ever see the difference.
The 32K RAM expansion and almost all of the other peripherals ran off the system bus, and had plug and play support that remains unmatched today. You plug in the card, and the drivers for the peripheral device are read from the ROM chip on the card at boot time.
The TI User's Groups are still quite active for a machine that was discontinued in 1983. You can actually get a couple of TI links from my webpage at www.glowingplate.com.
The TI-99/4A wasn't portable like the TRS-800 Model 100, but it was a highly cool little machine in its own way. Especially with that neat 1970s futuristic black and brushed aluminum case.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
For those of you old enough to remember - the TI99/A could produce ANY tonal frequency via simple BASIC program...
And a lot more! Three voice sound chip with a noise generator while most computers simply used a flip-flop to toggle the speaker on and off.
I made a touch-tone dialer program for it back when I was in elementary school. Loading the program from cassette kind of defeated the speed and convenience purpose of the dialer, though.
A friend of mine at the Ottawa TI User's Group took my idea a step further. The Speech Synthesizer was a common TI accessory, and he incorporated my program as a subroutine into an application that would read a diskette or cassette tape file of telephone numbers and call them. The program would dial, wait 30 seconds for the call to be picked up, and then start reading a message. Usually, it was used to broadcast meeting reminders in the days before e-mail.
Ahhhh, those were the days - when 16KB was a lot of RAM...Heh. I had a chunk of core memory kicking around. I pitched it when I moved to Toronto in 1996, but I'd really love to have it back so I could build a bunch of vacuum-tube sense amplifiers and actually interface it to an ISA bus. I'd need to sit down and get good at assembly language again before I could actually use it for anything. Maybe cache a very small HTML page in it just to have something cool on my webserver.
Oh yeah, it was about 256 bytes of 12 bit wide core memory. (12 bits wide, it was probably off a 1960s PDP-11, but I don't know for sure.)
Hmm... 12AX7s are common and cheap dual triode tubes. I must have a hundred of them; that collection should handle almost all of address bus side of the matrix. [Does quick calculation of heater voltage (12 volts) times 600mA heater current per tube times 128 tubes = 9,216 watt space heater, just for the address bus logic. Shelve that idea.]
anyone remember the Radio Shack Color Computer (CoCo)?Sure! Rockwell 6809 processor, same as the Vectrex vectored video arcade system. That was a pretty cool processor, it blew the 6502, 6510 and 8088 right out of the water. Very cool little chip. It was thge predecessor to the Motorola 68000.
I wanted a CoCo 50, which was the little micro Color Computer. Tiny thing with chicklet keys, but unlike the Timex-Sinclair 1000, the CoCo 50 had color and 5k of RAM. But I got the TI-99/4A for my 10th birthday instead, and never looked back.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
(Just use google for "mess" or "ti99 emulator" or "V9t9")
It emulates the 32 Kb memory extension as well. That was some hardware i could not afford in those days. And speech synth.
I played the parsec game hiscore round. Maybe again on the PC....
I had one of these for 12 years... I got it when I was 6, and learned to code on it. I spent days PEEKing and POKEing when other kids were playing hide and seek. When I saved up for the modem cable my life was NEVER the same. I remember when I finally got a 1200 baud modem, a whopping 4 times faster than the built in 300 baud, it was heaven. I was 8. I took the damn computer with me everywhere. I loved that little beast. Even with a PC I still my Trash80 more. Some of the best computing memories I have are from that. Playing Space Empire (and winning) on it's 8 little 40 character lines over a whopping 30 character per second connection; Programming pixel-by-pixel animations; those adventure books with the BASIC programs in them. You can replace those memories. And even the nicest laptop today will never replace my Model 100 in my heart...
--
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
...it boots in a split-second.
Why can't laptop manufacturers make a better memory-backup so you can just switch it on? Even suspend-to-disk takes perhaps 30 seconds to resume. Not a very long time, but it does make it useless for that sudden brilliant idea you need to jot down somewhere.
By the way - if you want to see what the Model 100 was like, check out the Club 100. They are quite active, sell hardware, modify the machines and you can download software. There are emulators too.
What is the sound of one hand clapping?
cat
Hanson lifted it above his head, and, chuckling at the expression on visitors' faces, flung the laptop onto the floor. It bounced a little; he scooped it up and dropped it once more for good measure. Then he switched it on: Everything sprang back to life, as good as new.
I was going to try this on my compaq M700, but when I was just about to lift it, the CD skipped and there was a read error, so I gave up.
Important Safety Tip: don't try floating-point math. The Borland FP emu code would crash the Jr.
ROT-13 to send me email
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
It died. A year ago I found a model 102 at a yard sale for $10. Not knowing what I needed it for, I still couldn't pass it up.
I'm going on a big trip this winter. I want to keep a good journal of the trip. The thought of writing with a pen and notebook (as in paper!) didn't go over well. In comes the 102. Small, reliable, easy on batteries and easy to use. Toss in a Null modem, and I'll be able to drop stuff on my dad's computer during breaks in the trip. 32k will hold a fair bit of text.
So a $10 alternative to a notebook, keeping the much needed ability to edit, and the ability to turn it into a web page without much effort. Of course the null-modem cable cost as much as the computer!
My only wish is that the built in programming language was Perl instead of BASIC!
I've been to Rick's site and got some usefull software, but the best part of the whole thing is the simple text editor that boots up in about 2 seconds. Michael
------------------------------
I wrote my first two books on a Tandy TRS-80 M100.
It was a beautiful device -- instant on, instant off (much more instant than, say, Windows CE) with no moving or hot parts and a basic, no-frills set of applications (the text editor was what I used most). The characters were large and easy-to-read and the keyboard was actually full-size and felt more or less like any old keyboard on any old computer. The whole thing was no thicker than a textbook (and much lighter) and I used it continuously and transferred the data to my PC using a null modem cable.
Then in 1995, it was stolen right out from under my nose at a busy public library -- the power was on, I was in mid-sentence and stopped to turn around and grab a reference from the table behind me. When I turned back, someone (one of about twenty people nearby) had taken it, and by the time I got around to saying "hey, somebody just stole my computer!" the selection of people in the vicinity had completely changed and it was long gone. Old, maybe -- but obviously still in demand.
After that happened, I decided it was time to update my mobile computing, so I got a nice high-end 486 color notebook computer made by AST and ran Linux on it. These days I'm running a ThinkPad 760XD with Linux.
But I'm nowhere near as productive, in sheer page count or imagination, as I was on my M100. I've begun to price them on eBay once again...
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
One of the best uses was as a teletype emulator. It could do 45-90 baud, 5 bit, 1-1/2 stop bit code. It was great for Ham Radio field days. Didn't need to lug a big power hungry MOD 28 Teletype out into the woods.
The truth shall set you free!
Translation please!
j/k
The Atari 400/800 had a pretty rugged setup with cast aluminum case around expansion cards.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I had a TI99/4A back in '81. Damn things were almost as durable as the TRS-80 laptops. Stamped steel expansion case - heavy duty.
The TRS-80 is the only <Grin> Laptop <Grin> that could survive military style repair procedures
In the event of error, first, Drop from at least 5 feet
If error persists, re-seat everything and call technical support
They were nice boxes, and given the pricing on modern heavy-duty laptops, they were a steal - for their time.
--CTH
--
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
I never knew Tandy made anything that portable before...but it does bring back some memories of the Speak 'n Spell that I had when I was a little kid. The only expansion those things afforded was a little word module which plugged in the back. I have no idea how E.T. made anything useful from it...
//e with 2 floppy drives and a color monitor.
/* ---- */
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7)
The price wasn't too bad, until you consider how much further money went back in the early 80's. I think my first computer cost about $3,000 back in 1984...an Apple
My elementary school had a couple TRS-80s...and the wires to connect a cassette player (anyone remember those?). I'd like to see a picture of one of the portables...
Ah...the memories of computing before the Internet!
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
That's 56kiloBITS not kiloBYTES so it's actually 7k/sec, which I have gotten up to on occasion. Although it usually more like 5k/sec, which is %71 of the theoretical top speed. If you apply the same percentage to the 300bps modem you get 401wpm.
"It comes with something even more pokey: a built-in 300-bps modem that sends text more slowly then the average person can type."
Really... most people type more then 562 words per minute?
Here are some websites of companies selling modern versions of TRS-80 like laptops. They are really sexy, especially the alphasmart and the quickpad. Generally, they have a 4 line b/w display, and go for 200+ hours on a few AAs. They cost around 200 dollars, and store about 100 pages of text (app. 200k). www.alphasmart.com www.quickpad.com www.perfectsolutions.com www.dreamwriter.com www.calcuscribe.com Some reviews: Alphasmart http://www.xpress.sfsu.edu/storyview.cfm?Story_ID= 1740
Quickpad
http://www.webreviews.com/97_08/quickpad.html
Also, there is a really good article reviewing the different textpads in the NYTimes that is worth purchasing if you're considering getting one of them. Do a search for Pogue and Keyboard. The article title begins with "State of the Art".
There was a nice game called Avalun. You were the ruler of a state, you had to buy wheat and distribute it to the population, you could by mills and markets, and if you had enough people and money you could become promoted to "Kaiser".
Two friends of mine liked it very much, but one had an old Schneider PC with tapes, the other had an PC with 5 1/4 inch diskettes, we had the 3 1/2 inch type. Since this game was written in ATARI BASIC (by some called the worst language ever existing) i printed the source code and the two others typed it in their computers. Naturally they had to do some porting. And the block with the music was missing. The whole game was textbased.
use Bielefeld.pm
The keyboard was rather clacky, so I pried the key caps off one day and inserted individually cut pieces of thin foam atop the key switches. Was deathly quiet forever afterwards.
I just bought a new MPC-206E, but that Model 100 ... it still rules.
The story:
About the end of 100's commercial lifespan (PC laptops were appearing) I think it was PC Magazine whose regular humor column had a great story of someone going through customs in some 3rd-world dictatorship. His duffle was searched, and his gear led to a flurry of interest, lots of consulting with higher-ups in a language he didn't understand, and him imagining life in a dark cell screaming "Please, I'm no yankee imperialist spy, it's not even that good of a laptop! It's only got 16k!"
Then, the head of security stepped up and said, in rough English "You have... very many... batteries". He had dozens for his extended trip and they thought he was black-market and hadn't even cared about the laptop.
Actually, there was unix for the TRS80 model 16. In my case, I took a Model 2 and added a hard drive and the M68000 borads from a model 16 (a lot of people at the time perfered running their model 16 boxen as model twos). Then I was able to load the machine up with Microsoft Xenix for the TRS80. Even in 1992 it hadn't been a supported configuration for half a decade, but Xenix was a more-or-less real System 7 unix, with a wretched c compiler and no networking to speak of. At one point Robert Dinse was running a rather large BBS in Seattle (Eskimo North) off of one of these, with a weird aftermarket (homebrew?) memory card that took him up to at least 4MB, maybe more. This supported hundreds of users total, tens simultaneously, compiling stuff, doing usenet, and basically being computer people back in the golden age. I will also note that when Eskimo North moved up to a Sun, they also aquired a 56k leased line, making them one of the first ISPs. It was also $12 or $15 a month, making it by far the cheapest ISP I'd ever met. Those were definitely days, if not actually the days.
The TRS-80 laptop with the "acoustic coupled" modem is the ultimate hacker tool. I saw a guy who had one of these at one of those hacker conventions. It fits in your back pack. The 7-11 has more batteries if you run out. You can hack from a phreaking pay phone. They will Never Catch You.
The downside of 300 baud is, while most probably can't type that fast with just two fingers, you can certainly read far faster than that thing spits letters across the screen. A 300 baud modem will take longer to download the ASCII art version of your favorite picture than your 56K modem will take to download the jpg.I had one of these and wrote programs on it.
Is there someone using that? Because my brother smashed mine with a hammer.
Get your Unix fortune now!
I've seen them discussed heavily -- and I have one!
For those of you who don't know what a PCjr is, they were manufactured by IBM as an "affordable computer solution" in the 1980s. Mine came with a mini-keyboard, an "orangescale" monitor, and a TV adapter (coaxial.)
There were two types; one shipped standard with 128kb of RAM, one with 256kb. There were no hard disks, just those bulky 5.25 inch floppies.
It came with three floppies: one blank, one for DOS (2.0 I believe), and finally one with a text editor and a primitive money managing application.
They could also be expanded to carry a 520bps (I believe) modem, but I never bought the expansion. You could call a friend and 'chat' using the application which was included with the modem.
Very interesting little box, I still have the papers that shipped with it, which I might scan and post to my website sometime in the near future. If I do, I'll reply to this thread...
Do you like German cars?
Oh yes, I had one of the very early ones off the assembly line (serial number 0000239), which cost me around $400. It was desitined to be an in-store demo machine. However, a friend of mine happened to be the RS district manager and convinced the one RS Computer Center (remember those?) in towh to give up the machine so I could buy it. Whereas the later ones had regular plastic chips, my CoCo had a whole slew of ceramic chips with gold plated contacts (which was something back then)...and a whopping 4K of memory!
I took it home and called my brother, who had some 16K memory chips that would work with it, so it got the instant memory upgrade. I had several of the cartridge games, and subscriptions to Rainbow and Color Computer News (both came with a cassette of programs each month).
Later, I got the rather expensive upgrade of the 5 1/4" floppy drive and a copy of OS9.
Cut my teeth in assembly language on it, as well as writing most of my research papers on it with VIP Writer.
Those were the days! Great little machine and pretty much bullet-proof.
Oh, to get back on topic, my autocross club used a Model 100 for running our timing equipment until two years ago when it finally gave up the ghost. Great little laptop!
We're sorry, the phone number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try your call again
What I really want to know is how to put Linux on one of those.
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#!/usr/bin/perl -w
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#!/usr/bin/perl
And with that simple utterance, a renaissance began.
Yeah, I remember the Trash80. Whatta machine, some horrible mutant word processor that made vi look fun. Fortunately, my boss at the time had enough sense to install Pickles & Trout CP/M with CrossTalk and dBase II. Then we were cooking !
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
Unfortunately, for them, by the time they actualized the Tandy/small business approach, they had already lost the market to the upstart IBM product, and it's competing Compaq luggable/sowing machine.
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
For all of us pining nostagically for the 'good-old-days', here's a link that will lurch us back into reality: http://www.pattosoft.com.au/jason/Articles/History OfComputers/1980s.html
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
That was the computer that started this obsession of mine :) I can remember when I got the external 5 1/2" floppy drive with dos 1.0a (or b) that came with it. I ran it with no drives for a good year at least however. I used to have it hooked up to the tv and play games on it and when the joysticks broke I started coding in basic since I couldn't play the games. I must have been 6 at the time. Where does the time go? When I think about it I can't remember what happened to it. But then I got it when I was 6 yrs old so I can't really blame myself for that one.
The phone, the bane of my existance, rings. "Hello, Computer Room" I say, being helpful - BOFH
Hi,
I just sold my old Atari Portfolio (VHS-sized DOS portable that ran on AA), for around $100. Then used that money to get a new MAKO (smaller, more memory, more utility, just as durable). So there, the collector's market was weird enough for me to 'flip' to a better device.
Ironically, despite the Model 100's rep for being still useful, the best offer I got for mine was $50. At $50, I'm keeping it as a toy for when I run luddite flashbacks.
So, despite the article citing $250 values for it, the market is very hit or miss. And if you check eBay, you'll find prices are pretty low (best are at around the $100 mark) for these.
Nice machine, but even as useful as it is, I think only folks already using it (who need it for legacy work or to replace their own) are getting them, and that really means a limited market. Unless you run Club 100 and are seen as the main outlet for these.
Just fyi.
A.
technology is to be used but we seem to be getting away from that these days to where technology is a fashion statement. so these guys can still do great work on their "ancient" laptops... thats great news. i have quite a bit of old tech myself but i try and make everything useful (if it is working of course!) - next project might be to turn my Mac SE into a kitchen recipe terminal. just because something is old doesn't mean its no use anymore, in fact i think advertising blinds people into thinking that the latest greatest PC with all the add-ons will make them more productive. yeah right.
I recall quite fondly my TRS-80 days (although it was a Model I); Loading and saving programs via cassette tape, those little stars winking. Programming in assembler; The first blocky graphics. Back when people had to use their imagination rather than lull people with graphics.
I remember transmitting a program to someone over the phone line by holding up the output of my tape recorder to the mic on the phone, and his holding the mic of his tape recorder to the earpiece of his phone... a primitive modem of sorts. It took a few tries to get it going, but we eventually got it transmitted with no line errors!
With some sadness I had to part with my TRS-80 Model I parts recently. It follows the trend of parting with my Data General Nova, and my PDP-8 (built into a metal desk with four 8" floppy drives).
While I defected into the land of the Apple ][+ around those days, I never lost my taste for the TRS-80, back when men were men and we hand assembled and disassembled for fun. Sure, we did it too on the 6502, but damn we had easy access to DISK drives of all things, with those apples. Where's the fun in that?
I've got some great TRS-80 emulators, so good that it just wasn't worth keeping the original hardware. There's a TRS-80 in the Smithsonian, so I can always visit if I get nostalgic.
READY
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Slashdot: Everything in Moderation, including Moderation itself.
"If you want to see a Lisa or a PCjr, you'll have to visit a computer museum. " Hell, i got a PCjr sitting down in my basement! Dunno if it still works after all these years though.... :P
listen.to/phonecalls -->My Prank Calls!
I have to agree that the NC 100 is a marvellous little PC. My only problem is an occasional loss of (it's) memory and I'm having great difficulty finding PC Card SRAM's for anything less than about $200 Australian.
I thought I had read about the Tandy 100 before - here's a similar item from Wired March 2000 where they cover the same ground plus more on the favourite PCs of the past.
Eric