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Inside the TRS-80 Model 100

Posted by timothy on from the oldies-goldies-be-bop-a-lula dept.

enalbro writes "What wouldn't you give for a laptop that starts instantly, weighs 3 pounds and gets 20 hours of battery life? That's the TRS-80 Model 100 in a nutshell. Granted, it displays only 8 lines of text and has just 28 kilobytes of memory, but it's a classic, the first truly popular portable in the U.S. At PC World we have a teardown that'll show you the guts of this featherweight champ." And, like many of the best things in life, it's powered by AA batteries (as is the Apple eMate).

5 of 228 comments (clear)

  1. Bought two used ones a long time back by JoeCommodore · · Score: 4, Informative

    One of which the previous owner had ran over with her car. Except for the missing LCD (was cracked) the unit worked; keyboard and all.

    Had a nice little BASIC and lots of cool ports. Trivia: the OS was the last major coding work by Bill Gates himself.

    --
    "Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
    1. Re:Bought two used ones a long time back by MichaelSmith · · Score: 3, Informative

      Some microcomputers from that era (Z80 and 6502 based) used the CPU reset as a normal key to jump back to the main prompt.

      --
      http://michaelsmith.id.au
  2. Re:eMate was NOT powered by AAs by commodoresloat · · Score: 3, Informative

    Agree - the emate was the perfect laptop in many ways and Apple - or someone - should bring back that form factor. But as far as the batteries go, you're right, but you can actually power the thing with regular AA batteries if you are willing to getyour hands dirty a bit.

  3. Re:Still have one. by kognate · · Score: 3, Informative

    What you are looking for then is the AlphaSmart Dana http://www.alphasmart.com/products/dana-w_In.html which is all of this and more.

  4. Re:Eh by gad_zuki! · · Score: 4, Informative

    Psst, look here:

    http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257&tid=107

    This is also why I pay no attention to the slashdot mob's opinions or predictions.