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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).

14 of 228 comments (clear)

  1. Eh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

    1. 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.

    2. Re:Eh by schwaang · · Score: 5, Funny

      Nah. Back then we used the 300baud modem to log in to Compuserve or MCImail and we liked it.

      That was back when people would see your email address on your business card and say "what's that?". And when you told them, they'd say "oh you nerds can talk to each other, how cute". Those people are now getting phished by hackers, so it's all good.

    3. Re:Eh by phulegart · · Score: 4, Funny

      Actually, this comment really shows how no one bothers to do a little more research than just reading titles.

      For instance... did you know...

      These computers, as well as the TRS-80 CoCos and the Model I, III, and IV units... the units that saved programs to cassette, have greater wireless capabilities than our current hardware. All it takes is to plug in the input and output that are supposed to go to the cassette recorder, and patch it into a HAM radio. It's already being done. People are sending programs and information half-way around the world, without wires and without the assistance of satellites.

      --
      "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -D. Adams
  2. 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 f8l_0e · · Score: 5, Funny

      From page 4 of the article: "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." I guess the quality of Microsoft software has stayed the same as the days when Bill was writing code.

  3. 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.

  4. 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
    1. Re:I still have mine by fishbowl · · Score: 4, Insightful


      >20 hours, on 4 AA batteries. No proprietary battery.

      Do not underestimate the impact of this, on its popularity.
      One big reason the Model 100 was so popular among journalists was
      the extremely good (even for now) battery life, together with the
      fact that the AA battery is something that you'd be able to get in
      even some very remote places.

      --
      -fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
  5. celibacy required? by Quadraginta · · Score: 4, Funny

    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?

  6. Gates coding "skills" strike again... by kwabbles · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
  7. 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.

  8. Re:keyboards by R2.0 · · Score: 4, Funny

    "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
  9. 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.