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).

Bought two used ones a long time back

[JoeCommodore]

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:eMate was NOT powered by AAs

[commodoresloat]

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.

eMate batteries

[cangrande]

While the eMate did use rechargable AA's, they were soldered together in a little heatshrink pack. So while they are a common size, it's not like you could pop them out and stick more in easily. Still, the battery pack is much easier to rebuild than something like a Powerbook battery from the same era, which often had 4/5 AA's soldered together with various safety components inside a sealed hard plastic case that was impossible to get apart and back together without some major hassles.

The Newton 2000 and 2100, on the other hand, had an optional removable battery pack that took standard AA's.

Those Newtons are remarkable machines and are amazingly useful for being more ten years old now.

Too bad they got discontinued, but the form factor of the eMate was the inspiration for the original clamshell iBooks.

Re:Eh

[atomicthumbs]

DARPA was still ARPA back then.

Re:The eMate had a built in rechargeable battery

[harrkev]

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]

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:Eh

[gad_zuki!]

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:Eh

[ahabswhale]

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:keyboards

[bhtooefr]

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. :))

Contains Last Code Written By bill Gates

[curmudgeon99]

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.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The JIS (Japanese) layout on Apple computers also has the control key directly left of the A on the home row.

Re:I still use mine

[jridley]

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.

The Cambridge Z88

[Alioth]

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:Bought two used ones a long time back

[MichaelSmith]

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

Noise and Braces

[alcmaeon]

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:eMate was NOT powered by AAs

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahhh, but the Messagepad 1X0, 2X00 line was able to be AA powered.

57mA draw w/o backlight.

Re:The Cambridge Z88

[jhoger]

The Z88 LCD is half the height but higher resolution.

Nice machine. One drawback versus the M100 is that it has a capactitor instead of a NiCd for maintaining the RAM disk. It seems like it wouldn't matter but in practice it is a huge issue.