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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."
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!
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
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;
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.
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
--
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!
"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)
Sorry, you're a bit off. AmigaBasic was written by MS, and persisted till AmigaOS 1.2.
Unfortunately, MS, in direct contravention of CBM Amiga development guidelines, used the upper 8-bits of the 32-bit M68k address space for type data (to acheive a typed-pointer effect a bit like a lisp machine) - since Amigas up to 1.2 only used 24-bits of the address space. However,
when Amigas went true 32-bit-clean, as CBM always said they would, every AmigaBasic application broke. Conspiracy theorists say that MS did this deliberately.
With AmigaOS 1.3, AmigaBasic was dropped, and with 2.0, the much more powerful ARexx was included as a standard system-wide scripting language. Pretty much every Amiga application after that had at least one ARexx message port for scripting support.
The third-party languages AMOS and Blitz Basic were particularly popular among games developers.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
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.
... 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!
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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
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 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
... 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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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"
POTS = Plain, Off The Shelf
"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
You mean it uses ones and zeros, too?
-cibrPLUR
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.
I *still* use my 8086 Toshiba T1000xe, for writing code for PIC embedded controllers.
Why? Because it works. The CGA screen is irrelevant, because I only use text mode on it. In text mode, the 10" LCD (more kind of blue on grey than black on white) is very clear and the keyboard is better than most new desktop PC's.
It's pretty slow by now, but I keep a WordStar-like (hey, old habits die hard) editor and the PIC assembler and emulator on it, and it goes just fine...
Not forgetting, 4 hours from a standard battery pack, and, because the battery connections are so simple (just plain old nicads, at 7.2v), it's got an "extended" battery pack in the carry bag... This is made of 6 Emergency Beacon NiCads, total capacity 9Ah, giving around 1 *week* of uninterrupted use...
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.
...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
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!
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
"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?
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.
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!
Once upon a time, Radio Shack tried to replace the Model 100/102/200 line with a dedicated word processor called the WP-2. In theory, it had all the necessary ingredients to be a successful replacement for the M10x line. In practice, it never sold well and was discontinued after about a year and a half of lackluster sales.
It had a full-size typewriter style keyboard that was actually better than the M10x line had, featuring comfortable sculpted keycaps. It had an 80-column by 8 line display. It had excellent runtime on AA batteries. It had a parallel printer port (something the M10x family never had), it had a real serial port that could go faster than 19,200 bps. It just never sold well.
Why? Well, I think the problem was the display. The 80-column width made the characters too small to see easily. If the machine had a higher-contrast display, the battery life would have suffered, but I think the display was too hard to read and that doomed the machine.
Anything that's going to successfully carry on the Model 100's legacy needs to have a readable display above all else.
Oh, by the way. For people who'd rather just click on a link than copy'n'paste URLs, here are the websites mentioned in the post to which I'm replying:
www.alphasmart.com
www.quickpad.com
www.perfectsolutions.com
www.dreamwriter.com
www.calcuscribe.com
Alphasmart review
Quickpad review
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.
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