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).

Eh

[by Anonymous Coward]

No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

Re:Eh

[phulegart (997083)]

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.

 

Re:

[tompaulco (629533)]

TRS-80s were awesome. I worked with a hardware guy once and he built a seismometer and we used a TRS-80 to read the seismometer output from the serial port and make a graph.

Re:

[Dadoo (899435)]

No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

Maybe, but the form factor of the machine is perfect for a lot of uses. I wonder how difficult it would be to develop a new motherboard, based on modern components. If you could put together an ultra-low-power ARM CPU, 128 meg, or so, of memory, and a CompactFlash slot for storage, you could run Linux on it. Replace the 25-pin serial port and the printer port with 9-pin serial and USB ports, replace the phone port with an actual modem jack, replace the bar code rea

Re:

[oodaloop (1229816)]

Yeah, it would have been so cool to log into DARPAnet while on the go.

Re:Eh

[schwaang (667808)]

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.

Re:

[adamofgreyskull (640712)]

Only Schneier knows why the parent isn't modded funny. And He's not telling.

Re:

[ahabswhale (1189519)]

Actually, ARPA was renamed in '72 which is why it's referred to as ARPANET, not DARPANET (ARPANET went live in '69). The TRS-80 Model 100 was introduced in 1983.

Re:Eh

[gad_zuki! (70830)]

Psst, look here:

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257&tid=107 [slashdot.org]

This is also why I pay no attention to the slashdot mob's opinions or predictions.

Re:

[Intron (870560)]

Someday it will be available within one's horseless carriage.

Bought two used ones a long time back

[JoeCommodore (567479)]

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.

Re:Bought two used ones a long time back

[eck011219 (851729)]

We had one that my dad left in the trunk of the car for about a week in the summer so the keys partially melted. It was hard to type (you really had to pound on a couple of the keys to get them to register) but it still worked like a charm. Now I worry about my Dell laptop on humid days.

Re:Bought two used ones a long time back

[Ooblek (544753)]

A friend was cleaning out his garage once and had one of these in a box. He gave it to me. I like tinkering with antique computers on occasion. (I still have my C64 programmers handbook that has the fold-out motherboard schematic in the back.)

A few years later, I velcroed it to a pull-out rack shelf and hooked a null modem cable to it to monitor the console output of a SSL Screen Sound setup (proprietary pro-audio digital mixer/editor in the days before Pro-tools). It couldn't quite keep up with the 9600 baud stream if there was a lot of data streaming fast like during bootup. It did the trick, however, when you just needed to go in and check some of the statuses while the system was running. I think I mostly used it to go in and low-level format the hard drives on occasion.

It was useful for a while, and that must have been somewhere in the mid-90s that I used it.

Re:Bought two used ones a long time back

[f8l_0e (775982)]

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.

Re:Bought two used ones a long time back

[MichaelSmith (789609)]

Some microcomputers from that era (Z80 and 6502 based) used the CPU reset as a normal key to jump back to the main prompt.

Re:

[morgan_greywolf (835522)]

Had a nice little BASIC and lots of cool ports. Trivia: the OS was the last major coding work by Bill Gates himself.

Yep. Witness these 'screenshots':

Jan 12, 1908 Tue 14:03:54 (C)Microsoft
BASIC TEXT TELCOM ADDRSS
SCHEDL MYFILE.DO -.- -.-

Select: _ 24121 Bytes free


(edited for slashdot's junk characters filter)

BASIC was highlighted. Press Enter:


Jan 12, 1908 Tue 14:03:54 (C)Microsoft
WARNING!
You are about to run BASIC. This
softwar

Re:

[sgt scrub (869860)]

I loved mine. The coupler for it was a breakthrough. Storing files on the 3.5" floppy was cool but time consuming. It was physically indestructable but didn't hold up to high temps for very long. I blew mine up twice sitting cross legged with a blanket on my lap. I wouldn't realize how hot it was getting because I was busy writing. The add on ROM was wonderful. Gates did a fantastic job on it.

Re:

[wass (72082)]

Back in 1999, a guy at my old workplace still used a TRS-80 Model 100 for field testing portable RS-232 devices he was building. And they had a huge budget, yet the TRS-80 was the best and easiest thing to enable rapid field testing.

The best part about the TRS-80 Model 100...

[thesolo (131008)]

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.

keyboards

[Tumbleweed (3706)]

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?

celibacy required?

[Quadraginta (902985)]

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?

Noise and Braces

[alcmaeon (684971)]

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.

Re:keyboards

[R2.0 (532027)]

"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.

Re:

[AKAImBatman (238306)]

The difference is that the Model M really was an excellent keyboard. With every key exceptionally well sprung, the keyboard was so heavy you could kill someone with it. (Hmmm... Colonel Mustard did it in the office with the keyboard?) Yet the keys were very responsive, well spaced, and easy to type on. I'm not sure I'd go as far as to demand that all modern keyboards should emulate the Model M, but it was a good keyboard.

Re:

[bhtooefr (649901)]

I'll just note that the past tense isn't correct - I'm typing this post on a Model M manufactured 2008-03-06, and with native USB. ;)

(Granted, it's an EnduraPro 104, and the construction isn't nearly as heavy duty as an IBM Model M, but it does say Model M on the bottom, and has buckling springs. :))

Love it!

[Saint Aardvark (159009)]

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. :-)

Re:Love it!

[bhtooefr (649901)]

That's when you upgrade him to a TRS-80 Model... 200 [oldcomputers.net]!

I still have mine

[corsec67 (627446)]

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".

Re:I still have mine

[fishbowl (7759)]

>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.

Gates coding "skills" strike again...

[kwabbles (259554)]

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.

what? no white model?

[pha7boy (1242512)]

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]?

I still use mine

[jridley (9305)]

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.

Re:

[jridley (9305)]

null modem cable. The Model 100 has a terminal program built in and will stream a text file from its memory out the line. Use a terminal program on the PC side to capture, just takes a minute. 1200 baud seems like it would be painful but even a lot of notes transfers in less than a minute.

Not a laptop

[Reality Master 101 (179095)]

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.

If you write for a living

[jalefkowit (101585)]

... the Model 100 is kinda the definition of the perfect portable:

• Insane battery life on bog-standard AA batteries you can buy in any airport gift shop
• Full size keyboard for easy typing
• Screen you can read in sunlight
• Case tough enough to take a serious beating without a flinch

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 [wikipedia.org] (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...

Tandy/Sharp PC-2

[GottliebPins (1113707)]

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.

Contains Last Code Written By bill Gates

[curmudgeon99 (1040054)]

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.

I learned to program

[presidentbeef (779674)]

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.

The BOFH was originally written on one of these...

[rincebrain (776480)]

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 [ntk.net]

The Cambridge Z88

[Alioth (221270)]

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!

Re:GK Chesterton

[Applekid (993327)]

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.

People have been predicting the death of the hulker desktop now for what, 10 years? Sure the move to smaller and efficient is what's going to make computing truly ubiquitous by hiding them everywhere (well, that and economics), but full-sized machines will always have more power and reflect the state-of-the-art computing muscle the industry has to offer.

But muscle isn't everything? Lalalala, I can't hear you. ;)

Re:

[bsDaemon (87307)]

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.

Re:GK Chesterton

[schwaang (667808)]

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.

Re:

[bhtooefr (649901)]

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.)

Re:eMate was NOT powered by AAs

[commodoresloat (172735)]

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 [felesmagus.com] a bit.

Re:

[harrkev (623093)]

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.

Re:Still have one.

[kognate (322256)]

What you are looking for then is the AlphaSmart Dana http://www.alphasmart.com/products/dana-w_In.html [alphasmart.com] which is all of this and more.

Re:

[Russ Nelson (33911)]

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.

Re:

[jmorris42 (1458)]

> 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 i

Re:Why not standardize batteries for mobile device

[British (51765)]

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.