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Inside the TRS-80 Model 100
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).
And the best part of it is...the control key is in the proper place! That is to say, it's directly left of the A key, on the home row. Just like the Happy Hacker or Sun keyboards. Amen.
Came across one in the hallway of a university I sometimes work at; it had been left for the janitors to take away so I snagged it for my son. He's almost two, and has fun banging away on it...any time he starts making his way toward my laptop, or my wife's, we just say, "Hey, where's your laptop these days?"
Only problem is, my wife has an iBook, and once he notices that his laptop isn't nearly as shiny as hers we're doomed. Lucky thing I'm a Linux sysadmin...I can just point to an xterm once he starts wondering about the difference between his laptop and ours. :-)
Carousel is a lie!
Granted, it is older than I am, but it is indeed quite impressive. My parents gave it to me when I was about 10 years old. Since I wanted to play games on it, I had to type code in from a book.
Instant boot. Sunlight readable display. Full travel keyboard, full size keys. Ctrl key in the correct place. No screen joints to wear out.
20 hours, on 4 AA batteries. No proprietary battery.
External storage is an audio cassette. I think it uses the modem to generate the sounds for the cassette, but I could be wrong.
The OS does have a few bugs, where if a program does something bad (not using PEEK and POKE, but pure basic), or is too big to tokenize, it crashes and erases all memory. That makes writing big programs very exciting.
The OS also isn't Y2K compatible, with this year being "1908".
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
We had one that my dad left in the trunk of the car for about a week in the summer so the keys partially melted. It was hard to type (you really had to pound on a couple of the keys to get them to register) but it still worked like a charm. Now I worry about my Dell laptop on humid days.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I have 3 of them, picked up a couple of spares off eBay for $30 total.
I use them to take minutes at meetings. I used to have a PC laptop but since all I used it for was to take minutes, I gave it to my brother who actually needed it. The Model 100 performs minute-taking just fine. Also I can touch type on it better than on a newer laptop keyboard.
The Model 100 was a MAINSTAY of journalists at the time; since it ran for many hours on AA batteries which you could get anywhere, even in small towns in foreign countries, and it had a built-in modem and a very portable acoustic coupler that would work with any phone you could find. I bet the majority of remote print reporting for several years was typed in the field on a Model 100.
A few years later, I velcroed it to a pull-out rack shelf and hooked a null modem cable to it to monitor the console output of a SSL Screen Sound setup (proprietary pro-audio digital mixer/editor in the days before Pro-tools). It couldn't quite keep up with the 9600 baud stream if there was a lot of data streaming fast like during bootup. It did the trick, however, when you just needed to go in and check some of the statuses while the system was running. I think I mostly used it to go in and low-level format the hard drives on occasion.
It was useful for a while, and that must have been somewhere in the mid-90s that I used it.
Time for a writing competition. Let's see who's out of the running first: you on a fancy laptop because your battery died, or me on a 100 because I ran out of memory. :)
The difference is that the Model M really was an excellent keyboard. With every key exceptionally well sprung, the keyboard was so heavy you could kill someone with it. (Hmmm... Colonel Mustard did it in the office with the keyboard?) Yet the keys were very responsive, well spaced, and easy to type on. I'm not sure I'd go as far as to demand that all modern keyboards should emulate the Model M, but it was a good keyboard.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The Dana and Dana wireless uses 3 AA batteries.
160x560 graphical screen runs PalmOS v4.1
Appently still avalible for $350.
To bad Access doesn't suport v4.1 anymore so you can't get the SDK anymore.
... the Model 100 is kinda the definition of the perfect portable:
Sure, it doesn't have the bells and whistles the kids are into like "color" or "graphics", but in a portable for writers none of that is really important -- which is why many journalists held on to their Model 100s long after they became ludicrously obsolete.
With the demise of products like the Psion Series 5 (another writer's portable), the niche that the Model 100 pioneered has basically been abandoned; the only thing close to it today is the EEE PC, which would be an ideal spiritual successor to the hardy 100 if the keyboard wasn't so danged small...
Read my blog.
Quick question, have you tried ThinkPad keyboards, especially the 600 series, T20-24, X20-23, T40-43, R50-52, X60-61,or T60-61?
Those are by far the best laptop keyboards I've ever typed on, and I greatly prefer them to most rubber dome keyboards. (However, I prefer a good buckling spring keyboard.)
My friend had a Model 100 and I was so jealous. That thing rocked! But I still have my TRS-80 PC-2 pocket computer. It's so easy to use. It's better than a calculator. You can type out entire formulas then if you make a mistake you can hit the back button and see the whole formula and fix whatever you did wrong. I use it every year come tax time. For such a small display you can address every pixel if you want to draw something or make a simple game and it has a speaker you can play music on. I also have the cassette/printer interface. The printer isn't a dot matrix but pen plotter. That was cool to watch it print reports or draw graphs. The paper goes up and down and the pens go side to side. That memory on it lasts for weeks on 4 AA batteries. Sometimes simple is better.
I have a Model 100 and the thinner Model 102. I used the 100 in college in the late 80's to take notes in class, and even wrote an alarm clock program that woke me up in the mornings! I did a little hack so that it would charge ni-cads from the ac adaptor (not a standard feature). I have the floppy drive, bar code reader, modem cups, etc... It had a very well integrated operating system. one of the better things microsoft has done IMHO.
Throw a four AA-cell pack with a Nokia N810 into a package with a real (full travel) compact bluetooth keyboard, and you'd get most of what you want with almost no engineering expense.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I know this is a strange comment to make in a Trash-80 thread, but: Have we gone back in time 10 years?
Ever since the 760 days, Lenovo have manufactured ThinkPads. The entire X and T lines, and everything before for at least 5 years has been Lenovo, including the keyboards. If you're of the opinion that Lenovo "taking over" the ThinkPad is a bad thing, you're very uninformed.
xkcdsw: the unofficial archive of Making xkcd Slightly Worse
What's interesting to me is the tension this sets up with operating systems like Vista which are moving in the opposite direction.
Just when the ultimate in MS bloatware comes out, suddenly a new (again) market appears for ultra-portable general-purpose PCs that can't run Vista.
So we have WinXP on the OLPC XO-1 and Asus EEE PC, etc., because Vista's too big and WinCE is too small. XP or linux+xfce are juuust right.
Personally I *want* my desktop to handle speech recognition and swooshy graphics if it has the beef. And I want my portable to have a huge battery life AND a general-purpose OS.
So I think this OS bloat bifurcation should continue.
I loved mine. The coupler for it was a breakthrough. Storing files on the 3.5" floppy was cool but time consuming. It was physically indestructable but didn't hold up to high temps for very long. I blew mine up twice sitting cross legged with a blanket on my lap. I wouldn't realize how hot it was getting because I was busy writing. The add on ROM was wonderful. Gates did a fantastic job on it.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
on one of these that my uncle gave me. Pretty much changed my life.
What this article really failed to mention was the software side. You could program anything on the computer in BASIC and the LCD screen made it easy to create and position graphics (no need to worry about resolution - each pixel is always in exactly the same place and precisely the same number characters will always fit on the screen.) Made for years of writing games and applications on that thing. This is really something the "laptops for kids" people should be thinking about.
Everything I need to know about copyrights I learned from Slashdot.
TRS-80s were awesome. I worked with a hardware guy once and he built a seismometer and we used a TRS-80 to read the seismometer output from the serial port and make a graph.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Of course not. Modern keyboards should emulate the IBM Selectric typewriter that the Model M emulated.
Now quit blocking my walker!
Simon Travaglia originally scored a TRS-80 out of a bin at the university he worked for at the time, and he wrote out a few articles of the Striped Irregular Bucket. Within that bloody machine came the character of the BOFH, and the rest...is something.
http://bofh.ntk.net/Bastard8.html
It's only an insult if it's not true.
No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
Maybe, but the form factor of the machine is perfect for a lot of uses. I wonder how difficult it would be to develop a new motherboard, based on modern components. If you could put together an ultra-low-power ARM CPU, 128 meg, or so, of memory, and a CompactFlash slot for storage, you could run Linux on it. Replace the 25-pin serial port and the printer port with 9-pin serial and USB ports, replace the phone port with an actual modem jack, replace the bar code reader port with a 100Mb Ethernet jack, and you'll have a fully functional computer, perfect for troubleshooting computer hardware in remote places. I'd bet all that would fit into the same box. You might even be able to include wireless.
Of course, I doubt you'd get 20 hours out of 4 AA batteries, then. If you still want that, you'd need to stay reasonably old-school: the same ARM CPU with just a few megabytes of memory. You could probably keep the CompactFlash slot, but you'd almost certainly have to drop down to 10Mb Ethernet, and give up the wireless. You'd also have to write your own operating system (and TCP/IP stack, ouch). It would still be cool, though.
Sit, Ubuntu, sit. Good dog.
Back in 1999, a guy at my old workplace still used a TRS-80 Model 100 for field testing portable RS-232 devices he was building. And they had a huge budget, yet the TRS-80 was the best and easiest thing to enable rapid field testing.
make world, not war