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

    No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

    1. 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.

  2. 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.
  3. 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.