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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 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
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.
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.
"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)
... 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!
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.
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.
---
satire, n: 1) witty language used to convey insults or scorn; 2) a form of humor lost on most slashdot moderators.
<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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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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