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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."
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.
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.
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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 found this picture, is that it?
-Jon
this is my sig.
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.
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.
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.