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Tandys Never Die

Posted by michael on from the they-just-get-dimmer-and-dimmer dept.

kevcol writes: "Great article on the SF Chronicle's website on a school bus driver in Contra Costa County California who heads a Tandy model 100 computer user group. The model 100 was the portable version of the beloved TRS-80 (jokingly known as the 'Trash 80') which was the first computer I ever laid fingers on in high school back in the day..."

2 of 172 comments (clear)

  1. Model 100 goes to work in the gaming industry by efedora · · Score: 4, Interesting

    When the Model 100 first came out it had very little memory (16k?). An acquaintance of mine asked if I could help with a programming project on the Model 100. He was a 'numbers' runner (illegal lottery conducted in the poorer sections of the city) and he wanted to keep track of the numbers that were bet. To avoid heavy losses he had to 'lay off' the numbers that were bet too heavily by betting those numbers with someone else. Bets were typically $.25 to $2.00 always in $.25 increments. When he tried to do the job with an M100 there wasn't enough space for the single precision values. I rewrote the program to handle the bets as integer values of quarters (Number 6666 has 450 quarters bet on it so lay off everything above 200 quarters) The amounts were displayed in real floating point values and his helpers knew immediately when a number got bet too heavily. The amounts don't sound like much but the payoff odds were very high. That Model 100 saved a lot of money.

  2. Re:Guys in Glass Houses.... by dougmc · · Score: 4, Funny
    Hmm. Bought on at the local Goodwill computer store a while back for $9.00. I set up a simple program --
    10 A = A + 1
    20 PRINT "Hello there #", $A ;
    30 GOTO 10
    And it's been running this for something like a year now. It's up to 113,869,084.

    The battery is very nice -- it let it keep going even while we moved offices and lost power :)