Inside the TRS-80 Model 100 228
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).
The best part about the TRS-80 Model 100... (Score:5, Interesting)
Love it! (Score:4, Interesting)
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. :-)
I still have mine (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Bought two used ones a long time back (Score:4, Interesting)
I still use mine (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Bought two used ones a long time back (Score:4, Interesting)
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:It's like a 3 lb CASIO watch. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:keyboards (Score:3, Interesting)
AlphaSmart's Dana (wireless) (Score:2, Interesting)
160x560 graphical screen runs PalmOS v4.1
Appently still avalible for $350.
To bad Access doesn't suport v4.1 anymore so you can't get the SDK anymore.
If you write for a living (Score:4, Interesting)
... the Model 100 is kinda the definition of the perfect portable:
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...
Re:energy efficient machines (Score:3, Interesting)
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.)
Tandy/Sharp PC-2 (Score:3, Interesting)
This was a great machine it its day! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Still have one. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The best part about the TRS-80 Model 100... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:energy efficient machines (Score:2, Interesting)
Ever since the 760 days, Lenovo have manufactured ThinkPads. The entire X and T lines, and everything before for at least 5 years has been Lenovo, including the keyboards. If you're of the opinion that Lenovo "taking over" the ThinkPad is a bad thing, you're very uninformed.
Re:GK Chesterton (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Bought two used ones a long time back (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Love it! (Score:1, Interesting)
For example, one Linux distro on a box I have has such a convoluted config for networking, I just ripped it out, and have
ifconfig eth0 10.0.0.5
ifconfig eth0 netmask 255.255.255.0
ifconfig eth0 up
hostname blarfbox
route add default gw 10.0.0.1
Its ugly, but it gets the machine up and on the net. If I need to change the IP address, I just edit that file, run a couple ifconfigs, and call it done.
Maybe I'm just an old timer where one had to even ifconfig up the local loopback adapter in SLS and early Slackware versions, so relying on a distro's point and drool GUI tools puts me off.
I learned to program (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Eh (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:keyboards (Score:1, Interesting)
Of course not. Modern keyboards should emulate the IBM Selectric typewriter that the Model M emulated.
Now quit blocking my walker!
The BOFH was originally written on one of these... (Score:3, Interesting)
http://bofh.ntk.net/Bastard8.html [ntk.net]
Re:Eh (Score:3, Interesting)
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 reader port with a 100Mb Ethernet jack, and you'll have a fully functional computer, perfect for troubleshooting computer hardware in remote places. I'd bet all that would fit into the same box. You might even be able to include wireless.
Of course, I doubt you'd get 20 hours out of 4 AA batteries, then. If you still want that, you'd need to stay reasonably old-school: the same ARM CPU with just a few megabytes of memory. You could probably keep the CompactFlash slot, but you'd almost certainly have to drop down to 10Mb Ethernet, and give up the wireless. You'd also have to write your own operating system (and TCP/IP stack, ouch). It would still be cool, though.
Re:Bought two used ones a long time back (Score:3, Interesting)