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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).
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.
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.
"Sorry, but nostalgia is not a good stand-in for real-world superiority."
I sense a great disturbance in the Force, as if thousands of Model M users cried out in rage, and then continued typing.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.