Slashdot Mirror
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).
No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
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
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.
Laptop makers could learn a thing or two from that keyboard - WAY better feel than those stupid flat keys that so many laptops use today (Apple, Sony, etc.). If you can't do something better than they did 20 years ago, just don't even try, m'kay?
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
If you can't do something better than they did 20 years ago, just don't even try, m'kay?
Bad news for virgins, huh?
From first page:
"the Model 100 served as the portable computing workhorse of its day. Bill Gates' also ranks it as one of his favorite computers of all time, in large part because he and a friend wrote the firmware it uses."
And then on the 4th page:
"Peeking in from the left is the reset button, which the user needs from time to time due to a few pesky bugs in the ROM code, reminding us that even non-Windows systems can crash."
Come on then. It's funny.
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
well, unless it comes out in all white, I'm not interested. I mean, how would I be able to look cool at the [local coffee shop]?
-- All this knowledge is giving me a raging brainer.
But muscle isn't everything? Lalalala, I can't hear you.
More Twoson than Cupertino
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.
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.
I plan on experimenting with Pico-ITX, or perhaps ARM systems this year, trying to see if I can't power a reasonably useful system on solar or so. I probably wouldn't want to be doing a buildworld every week on one, but it'd be nice to have something power efficient to idle IRC...
there is always going to be a place for hulking, massive systems -- however, we should try and make them as power efficient as possible.
While the eMate did use rechargable AA's, they were soldered together in a little heatshrink pack. So while they are a common size, it's not like you could pop them out and stick more in easily. Still, the battery pack is much easier to rebuild than something like a Powerbook battery from the same era, which often had 4/5 AA's soldered together with various safety components inside a sealed hard plastic case that was impossible to get apart and back together without some major hassles.
The Newton 2000 and 2100, on the other hand, had an optional removable battery pack that took standard AA's.
Those Newtons are remarkable machines and are amazingly useful for being more ten years old now.
Too bad they got discontinued, but the form factor of the eMate was the inspiration for the original clamshell iBooks.
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 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.
What wouldn't you give for a laptop that starts instantly, weighs 3 pounds and gets 20 hours of battery life?
I'd give a lot for that, but this wasn't it. This is more accurately described as a PDA that fits on your lap. What it did, it did well (for the time), but it was very limited. And modern PDAs get a lot more than 20 hours of battery life.
In other words, if you want a modern Model 100, get a PDA with one of those fold-up keyboards and go to town. Instant-on, long battery life, and destroys the Model 100 in usefulness.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
... 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.)
You can have wireless, you just have to try harder.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
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.
Well, it does take a rechargable battery pack. Inside the sealed pack are AA nicads.
I just disassembled the battery pack, and put brand-new AA NiMH batteries in there. Now, it gets a LOT longer life than it used to. The NiMH still self-discharges, though. I should have waited another year for Eneloop batteries to be invented.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
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.
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.
Could it not be narrowed down to about 10 different standardized rechargeable batteries?
But that would mean numerous companies could make the one battery type that covers numerous laptops, thus increasing competition and lowering price. Sadly, that means your favorite PC mfg couldn't gouge you for replacement batteries.
And that's why it won't happen.
I bought one of these in 1980 and it still works perfectly. What made it so amazing was that it had the BASIC programming language included with the ablity to create sound, a modem and other goodies. The OS for this device was reputed to have been the last piece of software that Bill Gates himself wrote. The user's manual was incredibly badly written--with page references to non-existent sections, etc. The manual was also reputed to be Bill's first book.
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.
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.
> I know just what you're looking for...
:)
Looks interesting. But it does have a few obvious downsides after a few minutes of looking.
1. It is bigger on two dimensions and about the same 2" depth vs a Model 100. After two decades I'd have expected a little improvement.
2. The keyboard LOOKS like the weak link, your statement that this actually IS a problem just confirms that the most important attribute of the Model 100, the wonderful keyboard, isn't replicated here.
3. No indication of battery life is given when using AA batteries, but since modern Li-ion rechargables have better energy density vs off the shelf AA Alkalines.... Again, it has been two decades and things like battery life are worse?
4. $350 for the base model seems a little much for what you get. Yes it has a bigger screen than my ancient Visor but it is just as monochromatic. Seriously, take my old Visor, double the RAM to 16MB, give it a bigger display and bolt on a keyboard and you get this product. Paid $99 for the Visor years ago.
For $350 you can get an Eeepc, smaller on all dimensions, similar chicklet keyboard but get a color screen and WiFi. Runtime is the only selling point for the AlphaSmart.
If they could either drastically reduce the sticker price or get a kick ass keyboard on it they would have a winner in my book.
Democrat delenda est
In the late 1980s, Clive Sinclair brought out a new computer, the Cambridge Z88. It can run for 20 hours on its AA batteries, and has a suite of useful productivity software. The LCD is also quite a bit larger, and it has a built in BASIC interpreter (BBC BASIC) and a built in Z80 assembler!
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
When we used those TRS-80 Model 100 computers back in the day, the keyboards were too noisy for taking notes in class, so we popped the keys and placed those little rubber bands for orthodontic braces over the posts, put the keys back on and the keyboard was virtually silent.