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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).

4 of 228 comments (clear)

  1. The best part about the TRS-80 Model 100... by thesolo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  2. I still have mine by corsec67 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  3. I still use mine by jridley · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:GK Chesterton by schwaang · · Score: 4, Interesting

    With the new crop of machines like the EEE PC it seems that we're moving back to small, power-efficient machines as opposed to huge hulkers.


    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.