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30 Years of the TRS-80 Model 100
An anonymous reader writes with this "interview with John R Hogerhuis, one of the key players in the still suprisingly active community for the TRS-80 Model 100 portable computer. As the Model 100 approaches its 30th birthday, John talks about what has kept the machine popular for so long, current software and hardware work that is keeping it relevant, and what modern developers could learn from spending some on a computer from 1983."
No comments yet, and the server is already slashdotted...
It must be running on one of those old beasties. :P
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Great curio. It runs forever on a set of AA batteries, and I've written a few BASIC programs to show it off. Once in a great while, I'll take notes on it, transferring back to PC via serial cable.
Love the keyboard, and the BASIC environment is the last OS type code that Bill Gates wrote.
Blogging because I can...
All the big-names are 30 years old just now.
This includes the TRS80 Color computer (The computer that got me into this crazy field in the first place... OS9 for ever!)
, Commodore VIC 20, 64, Apple II, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad They are all are / going to be in their 30's !!.
Who feels old now??
The Model 100 had a number of features that modern computers lack. If you need a simple computer to make notes, its battery life was in the 20 hours region. It was many many long years before the modern PC laptop was "portable" and had a battery life greater than 3 hours. (I'm thinking of some of the old transportables, which weighed 35 lbs and had no batteries.)
At long last, with the advent of the OLPC, the Eee PC, the smartphone, and a few of the smaller laptops, battery life has reached the 6 to 12 hours. However, for taking a piece of equipment to strange places with no power, being able to use AA batteries to power your computer is a really helpful feature.
Really wish the modern laptop could run from batteries longer. It's sad that a 30 year old PC is still competitive with regards to battery life.
I do. My first computer was a TRS-80 MC-10 (a sort of little brother to the CoCo that run a 6803, where I did my first assembly language experiments). The first actual code I wrote was on a Commodore 64 and I mucked around with Integer BASIC on Apple II's at school. And OS9 definitely rocked, and BASIC-09 is still for me the best structured BASIC variant ever developed. I'd take my Pascal programming class at school and with relative ease port the code I wrote over to BASIC-09.
Gawd I do feel old.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
...one of the key players in the still suprisingly active community for the TRS-80 Model 100 portable computer.
Reminds me of the episode of the Simpsons where Burns says "have I missed the 4:30 autogyro to Siam?"
well the Pocket PCs such as the HP 100/200LX had CGA screen with full 80x25 text and graphics and could run for at least 30 hours, with almost any DOS program you wish, include TCP clients (browsers, telnet, ftp, etc).
Here's a link to the emulator: http://sourceforge.net/projects/virtualt/
Simplest games? I had written several Space exploration games that were quite complex. You had to read your sensor and change your course based on sensor input. you could also input a formula based on the sensor variables and create a type of "auto pilot" as well. It was very cool playing with a text only simulation of the Solar system and slingshot the ship around trying to use the least amount of fuel to land on titan from earth.
It required a knowledge of Physics and trigonometry to play the game.
I had also written several combat simulators One was three player using a special serial cable with diodes. I never did find a third person to play with so we used the Old Co-Co as a third player.
They are highly advanced computers. Even the Sharp Pocket PC was advanced enough to do some amazing things. People are utterly spoiled with their insane levels of computing available today.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100
You can see many of his early ideas in how the thing operates.
Blogging because I can...
There *are* we servers running on model 100s out there.
They don't serve much, but they exist.
hawk
Wha?? Play games? This was a *portable* computer, it was made for serious work. Typing text really hasn't changed (except for that great *cough* HTMLization) and all a serious writer ever really needs is a text editor to do real work.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Battery technology has gotten much better, as well as tricks to lower power consumption. I wonder what sort of battery life you'd get if you took the same basic design, die-shrunk the chips to 32nm to lower the voltage, and used a large monolithic Lithium-Ion battery instead of a pack of AAs. Maybe add some dynamic frequency scaling, if that would get you anything.
I would not be surprised if you got a battery life measured in weeks.
Zilog's Z80 branding referred to the fact it was an enhanced clone of the Intel 8080.
But mostly people thought adding "80" to stuff sounded super futuristic in the 1970s. You'd see on all sorts of random electronics, and there was a semi-famous disco studio called "Sound-80".
And the OP is correct, "Trash-80" was definitely a term of endearment among the owners.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Yeah, but this is slashdot... home of the luddite. Everything was perfect back in 1970 when computers were more useful, less bloated, and (clearly) more open.
The Model 100 came out about the time I turned 18 and got an inheritance from my grand-father's estate. It was about five thousand bucks. Money was really tight and my new wife and I went round after round "discussing" whether it was more important that I get one of these devices or pay for something more "realistic" like things for the baby soon to arrive. I got one, but it wasn't pleasant. I still remember driving home from RS - had my wife drive so I could play with it - and being utterly enthralled with my new purchase.
Yes, the money probably could've been spent more prudently, but that computer helped launch my career in technology which has been, for the most part, very rewarding - my wife's not complaining about money, at least. After nearly 30 years, my wife doesn't argue so much about what I buy, my son has grown up and is doing just fine on his own, and my Model 100 is on the shelf right behind me. Still works, just like the day I got it.
I recall Microsofts International VP, Scott Oki, tapping away on his Model 100 when he visited us at DEC in 1983. I had the privilege of taking Paul Maritz, now of VMware, into seeing my CEO in 2011, and while waiting for my CEO, got chatting about iPads. I mentioned Scott Oki, and he said he remembered Scott going everywhere with that Tandy TRS 80 Model 100. Wasn't it actually made by Kyocera?
Hey what was wrong with the Trash 80? Not everybody had Apple money back then ya know. I had both the Trash and the VIC (Remember the Shatner commercial, complete with beam in?) and frankly they were great little machines for the time. Sure they weren't that powerful but then again a $10 cell phone is more powerful than the biggest computers were back then.
I think we would all do good to remember that the Trash, VIC, C64, BBC Micro and Sinclair changed a lot of folks lives and gave them a lifetime love of computing. Just think how different the world would be if those little guys never came out? if the only computers for sale in the 80s cost thousands of dollars? it would probably be a lot more empty place, with a lot less programs, tinkering, and DIYers out there.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I think we would all do good to remember that the Trash, VIC, C64, BBC Micro and Sinclair changed a lot of folks lives and gave them a lifetime love of computing. Just think how different the world would be if those little guys never came out? if the only computers for sale in the 80s cost thousands of dollars? it would probably be a lot more empty place, with a lot less programs, tinkering, and DIYers out there.
Indeed!
I managed to get my father to buy a $99.00 Vic from K-Mart back in the day, and it was a godsend. What was kind of funny is that for my birthday or Christmas, he'd buy me a cartridge for it (yes, like everybody I had the requisite Omega Race and Gorf.. both excellent), but I kept trying to explain to him what I really wanted was a datasette and a programmer's reference manual (a memory expansion was in the wildest dreams category). I never got either, and like many of us learned by playing with BASIC, figuring out that it was far too slow for games, then POKEing in machine code using magazines and the users's guide it came with to assemble some sort of memory map. Then the little sister would come alone and touch something (or my RTS didn't work out) and *poof* all gone. Wrote my first bubble sort on that machine.
By the time I was old enough to get a part time job I ended up buying a new Atari 130XE and a second hand 1050 drive off of some kid who was upgrading to the (then) very new Atari ST.
I would trade those experiences for NOTHING.
Exactly! my first real taste of computing was tweaking accounting programs for my dad on a Trash and being able to get magazines and actually understand the guts really helped me to appreciate the wonders of those little guys, so I asked for and got a VIC for Xmas the year they came out (1982? God it was so long ago. thank the Federation for the Shat commercial because my mom was a Sci/Fi lover and that swayed her) and a lifetime love of computing was born.
While others sat there staring at their NES and SNES I went from the VIC to a C64 to getting a steal on an IBM that was running the original OS/2, I went through a good dozen OSes, probably just as many different kinds of CPUs (I even had a Cyrix and a WinChip for awhile, remember those?) and through it all had a blast and it can all be traced back to the Trash and the VIC giving me something I could actually control and manipulate instead of blinding consuming.
so lets give credit where credit is due and celebrate the little guys of computing. sadly it looks like we are gonna get to see what happens when the little guys don't exist as the rise of locked down pads and phones seems to be creating a whole generation of little consumers, that all just take what they get without question and have no desire to know anything about it or how it works. As much as I'd enjoy being 20 again I really wouldn't trade my experiences for theirs, their tech may be more powerful but they have zero control.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.