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Hardware

TRS-80 Laptops Still Plugging Along 204

Posted by michael from the glorified-calculator dept.
jfruhlinger writes: "The San Francisco Chronicle ran this story about the very first laptop, and the fact that it's still in use by non-hobbyists. It's biggest selling point is apparently its indestructable nature."
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TRS-80 Laptops Still Plugging Along More

TRS-80 Laptops Still Plugging Along

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  • Re:photo? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yes that's it.

    The model 100 was my first 'real' computer (I lived in a boat, so now way to get anything but a laptop) after a Sharp PC-1211 (A pocket calculator programmable in BASIC).

    I still have it, nearly 20 years after, and it still works. It is hooked to my FreeBSD firewall.
    The model 100 was an awsome machine. 80c85 processor (roughly equivalent to a Z80, without the extended opcodes) at something like 4Mhz, 32 Kb of ROM with a BASIC, a TEXT application, an ADDRess one, a TERMinal emulator. Mine also had 32Kb of RAM, which was huge.

    Screen was 40x8 (320x64), the keyboard was a real keyboard, it run on 4 AA sized batteries, have an included modem (but not in the french version), came with a compuserve account. The arrow keys were very weak.

    The rom was made by a little know software shop (Microsoft), which also made dev tools.

    The machine have a Y2K bug (not the machine, but the Microsoft software), but, IIRC, one can get an eprom with a new patched ROM.

    I learned hacking on that machine. I had no documentation, and lived in a place (a boat) were getting some was not an option. I did not know how to program in anything but BASIC. I noticed 3 basic function (PEEK, POKE and CALL), so I randomly PEEKed, POKEd and CALLed in the RAM ROM, and tried to guess what the numbers did. I had a book about the 6502 (a different microprocessor), so I knew the concept of register, stack, etc, etc.

    In a few month (hint: I didn't had access to books, but I didn't have access to school either :-) ) I had understood almost every opcode and basically invented my own mnemonics for them. I wrote an disassembler to understand the ROM. Then an assembler (in BASIC), the helped me to write an assembler in assembler.

    I think I had too much time on my hands.

    Cheers,

    --fred

  • And this is a surprise, how? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I've lost count of how many people I've talked to who would happily sacrifice slim size and light weight for some durability.

    Heck, I've not bought any "new" (contemporary) test equipment for nearly 20 years. 99% of what I have is 80's-early 90's vintage stuff from Tektronix, HP, and other names like Cushman Electronics.

    Sure, the newer stuff may have more bells and whistles, but try repairing or maintaining it yourself! Replacing surface-mount components, even assuming you can get the part, is no picnic. I know; I've done it!

    I really think there needs to be a balance struck between the availability of high-tech hardware at a 'reasonable' price, and the ability to repair and maintain such hardware. The landfills are way too full as it is, and the motherboard in my main workstation just crapped out after only 2.5 years. If it had been designed and built PROPERLY, it should have lasted 25!

    Yeah, I know... everyone wants plug-and-play, then throw-it-away, all for the sake of instant gratification and ultra-cheap prices. Well, guess what? You get exactly what you pay for!

    Go ahead... mod this down if you want. I don't much give a rip...

  • Re:300bps? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You speak of young whipper-snappers! Bah! You should look in a mirror!

    Why, back in MY day, we transferred all of our important information on stone tablets, across our broken backs. We couldn't drive across the village. We had to walk, and sometimes that could take hours if we were carrying lots of data. Long lunch indeed! And we didn't even have soda, let alone cute receptionists...

    And disks? We had mules! Ever see how stubborn those things are?

  • Re:TI99A (Score:3)

    by Erbo ( 384 ) <amygalert@NOSPaM.gmail.com> on Tuesday July 24, 2001 @10:01PM (#63043) Homepage Journal
    I had one of those, too...and I had the big aluminum peripheral box with the disk drive and the memory expansion card, too. Sadly, I think my parents sold it or gave it away or something.

    I still have a TI-74 BASIC-programmable calculator...which, I think, evolved from a prototype of a "portable computer" that TI showed around 1985, the Compact Computer 40. The CC-40 was never sold, but a lot of its design work seems to have filtered into the TI-74. (Mostly, my TI-74 gets used to balance my checkbook these days. :-). )

    Eric
    --

  • Yes. That's the one.


    --
  • Integer BASIC was Woz's handiwork. the later FPBASIC was a licensed port of Microsoft BASIC -- in fact, the ROM chip on my ROM1 IIgs has a "(C) MICROSOFT 77" message printed on it.

    -lee
  • Yeah!

    Best sig ever! Where else do you match far east proverbs with east-kentucky moon-shine singing folklore.



    ~^~~^~^^~~^
  • People in the U.S. might not know this, but British computer manufacturer Amstrad produced an updated sort-of-clone of the TRS-80, the Notepad NC-100/200. Similar to the Tandy, it's a book-/papersize computer with a full-size keyboard and a 8 lines x 80 chars LCD display, serial (9600 baud) and parallel interfaces, built-in text editor, terminal program (with X-Modem file transfer) and BASIC, and it runs 12 hours on four AA batteries. Unlike the Tandy, it has 64k RAM (of which 59k can be used for documents), a PCMCIA slot for SRAM memory cards (up to 1 MB), all the while being thinner and lighter than the TRS-80 (about 1lbs). Check out this site [nexgo.de] and the Amstrad Notepad Users' Web [win-uk.net] for the gory details. The NC-200 model is equipped with more RAM, a DOS-compatible floppy drive and a bigger LCD, but I never saw one of those machines. I bought my NC-100 about 7 years ago for $80 (new), an excellent technical handbook was included.

    I own both the Tandy (in its European Olivetti-branded variant) and the Amstrad. The big plus of the Tandy are the display and the keyboard. Technically, the Amstrad is better - especially with a PCMCIA SRAM card -, and its much lower weight is also a big plus. I recently bought a foldable keyboard for my Palm, but found it a much less reliable and practical solution than the Armstrad.

    Florian

  • It was called ABasiC and was developed by Metacomco, since Microsoft's AmigaBASIC was not finished in time for the Amiga's launch. Metacomco also developed the original version of AmigaDOS. ABasiC shipped with versions 1.0 and 1.1 of Kickstart/Workbench, but by 1.2 it had been replaced by AmigaBASIC.

    --

  • ...was using the cassette relay to do pulse-dialling when on holiday in portugal. The house we were staying in had a lock on the phone dial (and no DTMF back then!) so I broke out the line, hooked it through the cassette relay and played with timings in basic to get the pulse lengths right.

    Free phone calls :)

    Hugo
  • AH he is correct. I was going to post about the Epson, which I saw again after many years at the MIT flea, with it's microcasette drive. I never owned an epson but did own both a model 100 and model 102, along with the acoustic coupled modem. I got a lot of wierd looks at phone booths in the mid 80s with it, especially considering how I looked (teenage punk). Which is probably not too wise considering what I was doing! Over the years, both computers managed to get Stolen. Shucks.
  • Either you've never connected to a BBS over a 300 baud connection, or you REALLY suck at typing. ;)

    Then again, it's been about 15-17 years since I had to work over a 300 baud connection. How much of that slowdown was due to the actual connection speed (keep in mind most systems, even back then, would echo your characters back to you - halving the connection speed. Most BBS systems didn't rely on local echo), and how much was due to the system on the other end being roughly the same speed as yours and therefore a little overwhelmed, is a debatable question.

    I had learned to touchtype a couple years earlier and was pushing around 60wpm, far less than 16cps, yet unless I used a terminal that had a line buffer characters would just go missing...
  • Yeah, MS-Basic was in a lot of early micros, not just Commodore machines. But in general these were ports, not personally written by BillG himself.
  • Okay, I'm dredging up really old memories here, but wasn't that essentially the same critter?

    No. The HX-20 was an entirely different design. It had a much smaller screen, built in printer, and had no built-in software except a BASIC interpreter.

  • Not the first laptop (Score:4)

    by Jonathan ( 5011 ) on Tuesday July 24, 2001 @09:02PM (#63054) Homepage
    The Espon HX-20 [ed.ac.uk] came out before the Model 100. Anti-Microsoft conspiracy buffs will note that the built-in software in the Model 100 was written by Bill Gates [tcp.com], so maybe that explains the revisonist history.
  • Panasonic has had a laptop line for as long as I can remember (= at least a couple years ;) that is geared specifically at being rugged. My last boss had one and would prove all the time just how tough it was-- I can remember him dropping it from ~5 feet, sliding it across a desk onto the floor, and even putting the fucker under the leg of his desk.

    Panasonic did a demo for abc news at some recent computer show (pc expo maybe?) for their new model of this series where they actually ran over the fucker. I can't imagine how much more rugged I'd need my laptop to be...
  • Ah me too! My dad had one from work (he wrote DB software for waste treatment plant maintenance) and often brought it home and let me play with it. It's where I began my long journey....

  • Re:OS? (Score:2)

    by FFFish ( 7567 )
    OS/9 is a thoroughly kick-ass operating system. Linux kernel programmers could learn a *lot* from it.

    It's a fully re-entrant, ROM-able, multitasking OS that can, in its minimal form, fit into 16K -- that's kilobytes, not megabytes -- of memory.

    It has a device-independent driver system that completely obviates any need for programs to know anything about the device they are reading or writing to. The drivers are hot-loadable.

    It's a helluva system. Well worth investigating.


    --
  • That looks very similar to the Commodore SX-64 [obsoleteco...museum.org] portable.

    Man, now THAT was a cool machine.

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • Getting spare parts actually wouldn't be that hard - it is built entirely from common components: 8085 cpu and discrete logic components. You can still get them from catalogs like Jameco.

    The case and LCD may be a little harder to get, though. It's a good thing the case is nearly indestructible...

    -

  • "The model 100 series is completely data compatible with every computer on the face of the earth."

    I suppose this old old machine which is older than many slashdotters still uses the standard RS-232 serial ports to do its interfacing to the outside world. It's one of the standards that has managed to endure, and it's probably only because this standard did endure that the TRS-80 laptops haven't died out. It's what allows you to use these Model 100's even in today's age. Without the ability to interface to the outside world no machine is worth beans.

    I don't know, but I think maybe RS-232's days as a ubiquitous standard are numbered. I recently bought an IBM ThinkPad which doesn't have any RS-232 ports, only USB's, which have caused me a great amount of grief (and no small amount of money as well, I shelled out the equivalent of US$50 for a USB to serial converter, no small change out here in the Third World!) attempting to interface it with my Palm. Will this trend continue, I wonder?

  • Specifically, he wrote the full-screen text editor. In assembly, I believe.

    I was under the impression this was in 1979 (it's a reference from the book "Gates", which I haven't actually read but have seen excerpts from...) This says the sucker shipped in 1983. Did the product take a long time to come out...?

    Rob
  • The first portable I was ever exposed to was the Kaypro II [wt.net], but you wouldn't call it a laptop. Came out the same year as the Tandy though.

    --

  • You can purchase modern modems with acoustic couplers [goessex.com].
  • My only wish is that the built in programming language was Perl instead of BASIC!

    That'd be tough. The memory requirements for even a cut down Perl interpreter are pretty substantial. Also, since the scripts are compiled at run-time, it'd be really slow...

  • Tandy Model 102 (Score:4)

    by Mike Buddha ( 10734 ) on Tuesday July 24, 2001 @08:55PM (#63068)
    I have two of them that I use regularly. The twelve hour battery life can't be beat, and when they run out, you can use POTS batteries to replace them. Its a great device for writing, although the onboard memory is a bit small.

    Since Christmas, I find myself using my Palm m105 and folding keyboard more and more often when I would've used the 102. Still, the 102 is a very useful device.

  • CoCo (Score:2)

    by mtm ( 10808 )
    Actually, OS-9 only ran on the Color Computer from Tandy, not the rest of the TRS-80s.

    I used to have 3 floppy drives and a Heath H-19 terminal hooked up to mine. One drive was for the OS, one for the C compiler and one was for data (programs that I wrote). It was always very amusing to have two people using my computer at once; one on the terminal and one at the "console". All this at a time when the PC was still running DOS 2.x. Not bad for Tandy's little toy computer! :-)
  • I was at the Microsoft WinME pre-release seminar here in .nz last year

    It was aimed at OEMs, and they were promoting the 'legacy-free pc', which would have no parallel, rs232 or isa connectors. They had a whole lot of "case studies" in the courseware stuff we got about people whose lives had been made so much harder by having isa devices and parallel ports (oh please), and how firewire, usb and pci were the golden future.

    They claimed then that they were not going to support "legacy" devices such as these in Windows XP (it was still whistler then, though)

    I couldn't imagine it happening then, and sure enough, when I tried a beta of XP, my 33k6 isa modem worked fine.

  • 300bps? (Score:3)

    by PlazMatiC ( 11127 ) <slashdot AT plaz DOT net DOT nz> on Tuesday July 24, 2001 @09:03PM (#63075) Homepage
    "The fastest modem connection the Tandy can support is 19,200 bps, sluggish compared with today's DSL and cable modems. (It comes with something even more pokey: a built-in 300-bps modem that sends text more slowly than the average person can type.)"

    I dunno about you guys, but I sure can't type 33 characters per second ;]

    (assuming an N81 connection)
  • Sorry, you're a bit off. AmigaBasic was written by MS, and persisted till AmigaOS 1.2.

    Unfortunately, MS, in direct contravention of CBM Amiga development guidelines, used the upper 8-bits of the 32-bit M68k address space for type data (to acheive a typed-pointer effect a bit like a lisp machine) - since Amigas up to 1.2 only used 24-bits of the address space. However,
    when Amigas went true 32-bit-clean, as CBM always said they would, every AmigaBasic application broke. Conspiracy theorists say that MS did this deliberately.

    With AmigaOS 1.3, AmigaBasic was dropped, and with 2.0, the much more powerful ARexx was included as a standard system-wide scripting language. Pretty much every Amiga application after that had at least one ARexx message port for scripting support.

    The third-party languages AMOS and Blitz Basic were particularly popular among games developers.
  • Mr. Gates was too busy sending letters to hobbiests complaining about code theft to do any actual work.

    Paul Allen was the smart one; he's the one that did most of the BASIC programming, AND the cloning of CPM into MSDOS.

    Gates was his BUISINESS partner, charged with making sure they would make money. Gates himself is incapable of any real contributions to software, other than to rip off other's work and peddle it as his own.

    Want proof? Tell me if this reads more like the work of a HACKER or the work of a pathetic, money grubbing, whiney, "we have the God given right to make a profit anyway we want" PHB:

    Quote:

    By William Henry Gates III
    February 3, 1976

    An Open Letter to Hobbyists

    To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market?

    Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.

    The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.

    Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?

    Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.

    What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on hobby software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at.

    I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.

    Bill Gates

    General Partner, Micro-Soft
  • We used to connect to the university lab with 300 baud modems. 4.1BSD UNIX was quite usable with it. It was even sufficient for rogue.
  • That just about made me cry.

    When I was in 1st grade ('81) and supposed to be learning to read my teachers and my parents were very concerned because Jane and Spot and Dick were _not_ running and at the rate I was going they were not really even crawling. It was Christmas time and Mom and dad talked to me and they told me I was going to a different school when the new year started (to a class for those with learning disabilities.)

    Santa brought us a TI-99/4A that Christmas and it came with a couple of joysticks and a speech synth (I had wanted an Atari, like the neighbors had). At the time, most of my waking thoughts were dedicated to the wonders of C3PO and R2D2. I knew that I could not make a robot but I thought that perhaps I could make the TI-99 talk to me. I spent all of that vacation pouring over the BASIC programming manuals and mostly I drew diamonds, hearts and turtles on the screen and made it beep. Most of this time was away from my folks and one night after a particularly frustrating day trying to find the documentation for the speech synth. I brought the BASIC reference manual (w/ Picture of Bill Cosby on the back) to my Dad and asked him what was the meaning of the word "Syntax."

    Dad: Rob, where'd you hear that word?"
    Me: I read it in the book, dad.
    Dad: No, Rob, you can't read that. Who told you that word?
    Me: Really, dad, I read it right here, "SIN-tax," what does it mean? Syntax Error?
    Dad: Sylvia! Get over here! Rob, read some other words on the page to me.
    Me: Dad, I just wanna know what it means. I keep seeing it when the type-a-writing is wrong.
    Dad: What do you mean? Type-a-write?
    Me: How do I type-a-write, so I can make the computer talk? .......

    I stayed in my regular classes and from then on mom and dad taught me to read.

  • My first ever program... (Score:3)

    by Plugh ( 27537 ) on Tuesday July 24, 2001 @09:24PM (#63085) Homepage
    ... was on a TRS-80 "Pocket Computer" of my Dad's. They came out at the same time as the Model 100 laptop, and were about 8 x 3.5 inches rectangle, 0.5 in. thick, and had one line of LCD display.

    My Dad still, to this day, uses that TRS-80 Pocket Computer. It sits on his desk next to an IBM RS/6000 CAD workstation. Hey says it's very handy for entering & solving calculations, and the steel casing is very durable -- he takes it onsite to industrial plants all the time.

    Radio Shack used to be such a cool hobbyist computer store... they even came out with a tiny, very quiet, thermal printer and a cassette tape drive for the Pocket Computer.

    I believe that Dad's TRS-80 still has my first-ever program in its tiny little memory: a loop that beeps and prints "I love you, Dad!" (cut me some slack, I was in 5th grade at the time :-)

  • What I really remember, though, is when we first got a floppy drive for the thing and thinking about how the 180 K that you could get on a SS/DD 5 1/4" diskette was so huge

    Ah, you had the later double-density floppy drive. My first two TRS-80 drives were single side, single density and stored (as I recall) about 63k. If you had a single floppy system the OS took up about 50k of that, so you had maybe 11-12k for programs and data. You -needed- that second floppy drive!

    The disk drives had a circle of black bars printed on the drive motor's hub. You were supposed to adjust the drive rotation speed by staring at the image under a flourescent light and turning an adjustment with a screwdriver; when the image of the bars stopped flickering, the drive was rotating at the correct speed. No, I am NOT making this up...

    Buying floppies was an adventure in which you felt good to get 8-9 good floppies out of a box of 10 on a really good day. You had to choose between hard- or soft-sectored disks, single or double sided, and single or double density, and all combinations of the above, and just try finding a store which even knew what a floppy disk was, let alone carried the particular version you needed. Lord, I do NOT miss those days :)

    After the Model 100/102/200 series came a group of "Laptop" computers similar to the market-leading Toshiba's of the day. The last of the line (or at least, the last one I kept track of,) was a little clamshell design with a 20 MB hard drive and Tandy's attempt at a DOS based GUI loaded over it (I forget what they called it -- it wasn't bad, actually.) I've still got a Model 100 and a Model 1400FD laptop down in the basement somewhere. They both still work. In earlier days the Model 100 was my doorbell controller: when you pressed the doorbell button the Model 100's screen lit up and presented a math problem. If you answered the problem correctly then the doorbell rang, if not you got to try again and the problem got harder. I have to keep the 1400FD laptop, though: out in the shop they have an old one running a labeling machine for plastic caps and mine is the backup in case that one ever fails. *sigh*

  • This is what I keep telling people about computers for use in the field: you don't need lots of computing power or an elaborate GUI, you do need battery options.

    A computer that runs on a standard batteries is extremely helpful in field computing, where there may be instances where you go days or even weeks without AC. If I were a reporter leaving to cover a war zone or a scientist on a remote expedition, I'd like the security of knowing I could pack a dozen AAA batteries and be good for weeks.

    I've been disappointed that Palm has decided to use standard batteries on their low end models with tiny screens. For one thing, I'd like to have some form of removeable storage.

    I guess the visor with a folding keyboard may be the way to go for people who need the kind of field worthiness of the old Tandys.

  • Solitaire...

    The reason Microsoft succeeded in the business market.
  • Zmodem was supposed to fix this with some kind of resume function, but it never worked right for me and Zmodem in general always seemed a little flaky...

    Resume worked just fine in ZModem, which turned into the defacto-standard file transfer protocol for the last 5-10 years of the BBS Age(tm). Sounds to me like a buggy implimentation.

    -- iCEBaLM

  • I ported CP/M to one of these (Score:4)

    by Hizonner ( 38491 ) on Tuesday July 24, 2001 @09:39PM (#63094)
    A friend of mine built a memory expansion card. As I recall, there was 32KB of RAM on that card, and he kludged up a bank select system that used a big transistor to forcibly overwhelm the drivers on one of the address lines.

    I wrote a CP/M BIOS that would bank-switch over to the normal address space and call the built-in ROM to do I/O. You had to buy the disk drive expansion kit, of course.

    We had this weird idea that we could sell it. No clue what we were doing, but it was fun.

  • WinSCP allows one to use SCP in a two pane filebrowser with the local hard drive on the left and the remote machine on the right. That can be had from:

    http://winscp.vse.cz/eng/

    Mindterm also has a two pane SCP utility built into it. Being a java app, it looks the same on either Mac, Windows, or Unix. It didn't work too well for me with Kaffe but it works great with the Blackdown JVM. You can try it as a browser applet at:

    http://www.appgate.org/products/mindterm/demo/ap pl et.html

    You can download precompiled jar files and source from:

    http://www.appgate.org/products/mindterm/persona l/ mindterm_downloads.html

    I recommend these to my Mac and Windows using friends to pull files from my cable modem connected server. Time/Warner has never hassled me about ssh like they do www and ftp and these clients make it dead easy for my buddies.

    With MindTerm, remember to open a ssh command shell first then open the File menu to get the SCP browser. WinSCP is a SCP browser only.

  • Quite good actually. Many of the teachers I work have have Macs of various description at home and they usually are four years old or more. The build quality of a typical piece of Mac hardware is comparable to the better PC components. Think Asus mobo versus the ones that come from fly-by-night Korean companies.

    If you really want your Mac to last five more years then it probably can be done. My best advice for you is to keep the inside of the machine clean. It has internal fans and ghost turds will accumulate in there. Also, like most modern PC hardware, it isn't terribly tolerant of low quality noisy power. Get a good UPS for it.

    I must point out that you can probably expect the hard drive and maybe the floppy drive to succumb to some mechanical failure. There are a lot of crap Seagate drives in Apples of that era. The rest of the machine will probably keep on truckin' if you're nice to it.
  • Well, I can't argue with most of your comment. You obviously had more patience than I with the TI. I pretty much lost interest when I found out about it's built-in limitations

    I will address the TMS9918 problem. Yes, you are right, it was never supported on the motherboard. I never claimed it was. I was, however, involved in a development project that required video overlay. The chip of choice was the TMS9918 because it was the only one on the market that even claimed the ability. A great deal of engineering went into trying to make it work. It wasn't until after much communcation with TI and TI realized enough of a demand that they finally released an updated version that the overlay and genlock actually worked. If you managed to get it to work on a TI-99/4A then you must have gotten one late in the game that had the updated chip.
    It was my understanding that the TI-99/4A was no longer being sold when the update was released.


    ---
  • Rockwell 6809 processor

    Uhh.. no. Motorola 6809 processor. The heart of the CoCo. And, yes it blew the sh*t out of every processor on the market at the time for computing power. The Rockwell nee Commodore nee MOS 6502 blew the sh*t out of everything for speed.
    All the serious arcade games were based on the 6502 (some even had one CPU per CRT color gun in color games)

    ---

  • Re:TI-99/4A Kicked Butt! (Score:4)

    by The Original Bobski ( 52567 ) on Tuesday July 24, 2001 @11:43PM (#63103) Homepage Journal
    You are close:

    I think they were originally sold for $400. I bought mine for $200. It wasn't until they realized these things just weren't catching on that they sold them for the cut-rate $99.

    The video overlay feature in the TMS9918 never worked until an updated version was released well after the TI-99/4A was long dead.

    Additionally, although the TMS9900 was a 16 bit processor in an 8 bit world, The TI-99/4A was a pig in that, as you said, the 16k "stock" RAM was attached to the video controller; the CPU had no direct access to it. All memory I/O was through a port on the video controller.

    On top of that, the cartridges and the built in BASIC ROM were all serial ROMS, accessed only a bit at a time.
    Further, the scratch memory and all expansion peripherals were choked down to 8 bit wide access.

    It could have been a really cool machine if it hadn't been so horribly cobbled by it's design.


    ---
  • "I don't remember very well, but I thought you could use only 8 sprites simultaneously. Am I wrong, or was it maybe a software limit?"

    No, you could use 32 sprites. But you could only use 8 at a time on the same row, any more would cause some sprites to become clear in parts. The Colecovision had a simular chip with the same problems.

  • Ok, so you can fix at the HW level - that's good, I guess I probably envy you however I have fixed things at the hardware level in the past (voltage regulator on my comodore PET fried when I was in the 5th grade) but if we want to get computers into the hands of people who want to work on the computers and not think about volts this and amps that then we can't expect them to whip out the soldering iron. For home text writing I would love one of the mentioned systems, and probably one of yours, too. However if I were (for example) scanning the sky looking for white drawfs and I needed some serious image processing power I don't think I'd go back to my PET whose HW is only as reliable as my soldering abilities and whose processing power also a lower power of my thinking ability.

    I think what you speak of is more of the built to last sort of systems. Your computers hark from an age when not many people were buying computers and the HW was aptly suited to the consumer. I tend to use sun equipment because I feel they are built to last (see below for I'm sure someone will post how sun is crap and brand X is best) and I feel sun equipment falls under your high end component that you (the above poster, not neccessarily all of you) and I can repair.

    Do I want better made hardware at cheaper prices? YOU BET! That's why I pay for the better stuff whenver feasibly affordable since I feel it sends a message to those who I feel make inferior components and it might help drive down the costs of the high end stuff in the long run...
  • The best feature of the TRS-80 is that the second you press the power button, you're ready to go to work. Computers of today still don't have that capability. Kinda makes you rethink the definition of "obsolete".

  • I still have my Model 200 -- functionally the same as the Model 100, but with a bigger, flip-up screen and more memory IIRC. Indestructible is indeed the word for these things (and the battery life is terrific...) I used to use mine as a portable terminal for amateur packet radio. I don't do much of that any more but my Model 200 still sits on a shelf above my electronics workbench, next to an RS-232 breakout box. I typically use it as a terminal when I'm hacking hardware with a serial port interface... most recently when I was fixing a Sony laserdisc player I found in a dumpster. I expect I'll have uses for the thing as long as there are devices out there with RS-232 interfaces...
    kiscica
  • (Mostly, my TI-74 gets used to balance my checkbook these days. :-)

    And you are broke why?

  • Ah, Those Were The Days (tm) (Score:3)

    by Observer ( 91365 ) on Tuesday July 24, 2001 @11:27PM (#63117)
    A remember a page of spoof advertisements that Byte magazine (RIP) ran in an April edition. One of them purported to be from a company that manufactured inexpensive facsimiles of the new-fangled portables for people who needed the kudos of having the latest executive/ techno gadget but who had neither the budget or the need for one that actually worked. There were two models, based on the TRS-80 and on a larger luggable one (the Osborne, perhaps). I didn't keep the ad, but I remember that the description included something along these lines:

    <approximate quote>

    The lids open to give access to storage space for people on the move. The TRS-80 model can easily hold a notebook, calculator, appointments diary, pens and pencils, and still have enough room for a lunchtime sandwich. The larger (Osborne) can in addition accomodate a change of shirt and underclothes for an overnight stay.

    Great care has been taken over verisimilitude. Several of the keys on the TRS-80 are designed to easily fall off, and its "LCD" has several permanent black spots, while the (Osborne) is just slightly too large in all dimensions to easily fit in the luggage rack or under the seat in airline coach-class, and has built-in weights placed so as to make it difficult to carry and manoevre without frequently hitting or chafing the user's shin.

    </approximate quote>

    A little unfair on the TRS-80, perhaps, but pretty accurate for the first generation of luggables.

  • photo? (Score:5)

    by jon_c ( 100593 ) on Tuesday July 24, 2001 @09:55PM (#63119) Homepage
    i found this [ndirect.co.uk] picture, is that it?

    -Jon

  • Yah, my IIIxe and PPK fill the niche of the laptop I don't have - writing.

    Actually, I just converted some html and css files to docs, and I'm going to try to do some coding on my Palm on the train. Now all I need is a full-featured browser for the Palm and I'm set....

    But isn't the keyboard great? Wheee.

    -j

  • I don't think I'm going to dignify that with a directly relevant response....

    -j
  • I've tried to teach my thinkpad 600E to fly a number of times (the power cord occassionally gets wrapped around my leg)... The first time it did a perfect 180-degree spin, the screen cleanly snapped shut on hitting the chair, and it did a perfect four-point landing on the floor (which was about as hard as concrete). It still worked (generally), but the hard drive started to act up, so it was replaced a few weeks later. I tried again a few weeks ago, and it didn't suffer any consequences this time. But you're right, I can't imagine throwing the thing to someone across the room..

    ---

  • Re:OS? (Score:3)

    by psocccer ( 105399 ) on Tuesday July 24, 2001 @09:29PM (#63123) Homepage
    Yeah, we all get the joke, but it may be of some interest to younger /. readers that there was a unix-like OS for the TRS-80 line of computers, though I don't think you could use it until the Model II or so with 32KB of ram. It was OS-9 with some info here. [southwind.net]

    It was a bear to work with though from what I remember. You like normal then loaded OS-9 and it took over the machine. Then you would load commands in to memory for use, kind of like a memory mount. Then you would have to constantly, it seemed anyway, swap disks to get everything you needed, though having 2 disk drives could help a lot. I didn't have enought money to spring for that HUGE 20 meg hard drive. :)

    It was neat though, had an assembler, C compiler, BASIC compiler, and even pascal I think. Though I was young at the age, I do remember having to use it to run Infocom's Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
  • ... they'd get almost as much functionality as the TRS-80, plus Solitaire!
  • Those were fun. I got mine(since given to my brother when I joined the Marines) salvaging during bulk trash season. You'd be surprised at all the cool working stuff people trash. My first TV(first two or three actually) was from that, I got a set of golf clubs, all sorts of stuff... I wish they had something like that out here in california. Technically salvaging from trash piles was illegal, but the cities enforcement policy was this "If the property owner complains, we will send the cops." Otherwise, there was NO enforcment. I've been digging through piles with a cop car driving by and had no problems... those were the days.

  • Percusive Maintenance (Score:3)

    by cybermage ( 112274 ) on Tuesday July 24, 2001 @08:57PM (#63129) Homepage Journal
    I wish my laptop could withstand that kind of abuse. I given the occasional computer a well-placed whack (usually to quiet down a fan I couldn't immediately attend to), but I can't imagine throwing my laptop to the floor as a demonstration. Are we taking a step backwards settling for these high-resoluton LCD models?
  • The TRS 80 was actually made by NEC, who marketed an almost identical machine under their own name, the NEC 8201, without the internal modem. Had mine online from the WisconsinState Capitol's guide desk for the 2 weeks we had a sit-in over investments in Apartheid South Africa.

  • Bill Gates wrote code for the basic (Score:4)

    by petermarks ( 133408 ) on Tuesday July 24, 2001 @08:58PM (#63136)
    In 1992 I interviewed Mr Gates for ABC Radio (Australia). I asked him if he did any programming any more and he said the last thing he actually coded himself was part of the basic in the Tandy Model 100.
  • Well.....I own a Mac shop, and in my view (and experience) the lack of a fan on early Macs and the cube is a "bug, not a feature". Heat is the enemy of longevity, and heat problems abounded in the early, fanless Macs. A small cottage industry grew up for add-on fans. Though we haven't worked on too many cubes yet here, the word I have from shops that have is that, again, there are many heat problems. It seems that the good Mr. Jobs doesn't like fans....many enginers, including quite a few at Apple, strongly disagree.
  • But it didn't look anything like the kind of laptops you see today. It had a four-line character-based LCD, and was fun as hell to play with. Every Radio Shack around that time had one...and it was nifty just to type on. Nowadays we'd use a Palm or a Visor for the sort of things you'd do on one of those, but I can see why you'd want a full-sized keyboard, BASIC, and a piece of near-indestructable hardware for the uses these old guys are seeing.
  • These suckers were pretty close to indestructible, too.

    They were among the first "notebook" laptops made -- that is, in an 8.5"x11.5" form factor. 16 shades of gray VGA at 640x480, 286 processors, 1MB of RAM, and 20MB of hard disk space.

    I had one for ten years. The only reason I gave it up was because it somehow ended up under my bedpost -- not very good for the LCD screen.

    Anyhow, I remember PC Magazine ran an "abuse" test on several notebooks around this time (although I think they used the 386 model). They poured coffee on 'em. They dropped 'em from a height. They did all sorts of crazy things to them. In the end, the Sanyo design (also sold by Zeos and Everex) was the only laptop to remain functioning after all this abuse.

    It was a great machine. And I hope this Athlon desktop I'm using now will last ten years as my music studio machine, too.

    Ciao!
  • The Espon HX-20 came out before the Model 100

    Okay, I'm dredging up really old memories here, but wasn't that essentially the same critter? There were three or four variants (a friend had the Olivetti version, with a hinged LCD instead of the dial-adjust "brightness" control), and the Shack's was just the best-selling one. (The ROMs were different, as well; I forget who made the Olive's BASIC.)

  • Nice article. I used to really want one of those when they came out, but I was on the dole and couldn't afford it...

    Of course, the really cool thing about this article is that people are using this old hardware to do a job.

    Not because it's 'Kewl', 'l33t', or Retro-Chic, but because they do the job required and can cope with the conditions under which the job is done.

    Now that is far cooler than geeks farting about.

    Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems
  • Personally I think the m10x models are junk -- I wouldn't take one if you paid me. I have a IIIx, love it, but my first PalmPilot, a IIIe, died horribly in a locker room accident. Not much for durability.

    But the TRS-80 Model 100... if only they were still around in some form. That's a design, that one -- everything a portable computer of its age could possibly need to be. Take one of those things, slap a modem, ethernet, and USB on it and give it a modern processor (PPC embedded or some sort) and a few megs of memory... sounds good to me...

    /Brian
  • More like 8x40, I think.

    What was even more fun were the pocket computers. I always wanted one of those, even though they were just glorified scientific calculators. I think most of them were Sharp OEM systems, sort of ancestral to the Wizard or Zaurus but with more open-ended functionality. And yes, they all had Basic.

    The pocket computer of the early- to mid-80s is dead, though; the family tree continues, but it diverged. On the one hand you've got graphing calculators (note to HP users: TI rocks!), and on the other hand you've got things like the PalmPilot and PocketPC. Neither one has the kind of functionality that these pocket computers did out of the box, even though they're so much more powerful :-(

    /Brian
  • POTS = Plain, Off The Shelf
  • "TRS-80 Laptops Still Plugging Along"

    Wait...I thought the point of laptops is that they were unplugged. Nevermind.
  • Yep, I can't tell you how many lines of BASIC I wrote on a Model 200 plugged into a CP/M via a terminal cable. Sometimes I wish I had one floating around. But then I think about how much I like my Vaio. However...

    Battery life was wonderful. AA's that worked seemingly forever, although we got in the habit of cycling NiCD's through it. It survived the environment we used it in which was a oily, dirty, industrial sawmill. Never complained, and worked like a champ.

    --

  • Re:300bps? (Score:3)

    by fwc ( 168330 ) on Tuesday July 24, 2001 @09:57PM (#63156)
    Let me prefix this with the fact that I used a 300bps modem back in about 87. A lot in fact.

    My typing has been around 60-90 wpm since about that time, depending on keyboard, what I am typing, etc. etc.

    90 wpm = 450 cpm = 7.5 cps.

    300bps = 30cps. (8 data, no parity, one start, one stop bit= 10 bits/byte).

    I can't remember ever overtyping the modem.

    What I can remember is that I definately could *read* faster than 30cps. Especially painful was when something started spewing a file to you which was way too big.

    I can ALSO remember downloading 20kbyte programs and waiting 10 mins. A 100k program was almost an hour.

    I also remember typing faster than either the net (meaning GTE Telenet/Tymnet) plus the host (The Vaxen (If I recall correctly) which were The Source) could handle, so you could get ahead.

    As far as a 300bps not performing near it's theoretical throughput, I would have to say that that statement is technically incorrect. A 300bps modem would ALWAYS work at exactly 300bps. Now, occasionally you'd get line noise, and it would show up at exactly 300bps.

    Remeber 300bps modems didn't have error correction or compression or anything like that. Basically they listened for two tones on the line. If there was a blast of noise which contained either or both tones, you'd get crap. Usually {'s and other similar characters.

    Generally, if you couldn't use a line, you'd just redial. OR filter it, etc. etc. etc.

    I remember when The Source offered a 2400bps modem paid for over several monthly bills. I could not pass it up. I was in *HEAVEN* at 2400bps.

    The only problem was that I had to write my own interrupt driven modem software for my Epson PX-8 Laptop, as the builtin stuff would loose characters at 2400bps.

    --

  • "The Model 100 series is completely data compatible with every computer on the face of the earth," said Hanson.

    You mean it uses ones and zeros, too?

  • Re:Bill Gates wrote code for the basic (Score:3)

    by IvyMike ( 178408 ) on Tuesday July 24, 2001 @11:43PM (#63163)

    For a long time, I was trying to spread the meme that Gates wrote the banana-throwing monkey QBASIC program that came with MS DOS 5.0 (I think it was 5.0) but not enough people knew what I was talking about for my lie to propagate.

  • I like the picture on the front page of the article... Rick Hanson drops the TRS-80 from about three feet (approx a meter for those of you who've advanced far beyond us Americans by using the Metric system)... click the thumbnail at the top of the article.

    I'd do this with my ThinkPad once, and then would have to think about it a while before doing so. I would survive, but there'd definitely be some superficial damage.

    Now, how many times do you think Mr. Hanson has done that particular demonstration (actually, how many times do you think he did it for Carolyn Said (the reporter))?

    "They very seldom need repair." -- Cathleen Cox

    I'd hope so, I wonder how hard it is to get spare parts.

    And, for those of you who don't read the article...

    The laptop's lore is good for some nifty trivia questions. For example: Who wrote the Model 100's software? Answer: Bill Gates.
  • I have a couple of these. I think one still works, but the keyboard on the other is dead.
    They were pretty cool, they had a built-in 24-column printer (till roll type), and a 20x4 LCD which, although it wasn't backlit, was clearly readable in very dim lighting. Bright moonlight was enough...
    They also had a microcassette drive that plugged into the side, which could be replaced with a rom cartridge. *And* they had space for an option rom in a little hatch underneath. This was used to support the disk option, but I had a Forth rom in mine.
    And the real clincher? They had Microsoft BASIC!
  • I *still* use my 8086 Toshiba T1000xe, for writing code for PIC embedded controllers.
    Why? Because it works. The CGA screen is irrelevant, because I only use text mode on it. In text mode, the 10" LCD (more kind of blue on grey than black on white) is very clear and the keyboard is better than most new desktop PC's.
    It's pretty slow by now, but I keep a WordStar-like (hey, old habits die hard) editor and the PIC assembler and emulator on it, and it goes just fine...
    Not forgetting, 4 hours from a standard battery pack, and, because the battery connections are so simple (just plain old nicads, at 7.2v), it's got an "extended" battery pack in the carry bag... This is made of 6 Emergency Beacon NiCads, total capacity 9Ah, giving around 1 *week* of uninterrupted use...
  • . The larger (Osborne) can in addition accomodate a change of shirt and underclothes for an overnight stay.

    See those slots under the disk drives? They're meant to be for disks. But you can get a spare pair of clean socks in there...


  • 30 cps, don't forget the start bit as well. 300 / (1 start + 8 data + 1 stop) = 30.

    Heh. Remember speed tweaks for 300 baud?

    300 / (1 start + 7 data + 0 stop) = 37.5

    Back then there was no need for anything greater than 128 ASCII characters.

    Of course, with an acoustic-coupled FSK modem, handshaking was non-existant and Mom would break the silence by calling you for dinner. Her voice would always leak past the seal around the telephone handset and interrupt the 2 hours you'd already devoted to downloading *one* GIF. So keeping the stop bit probably wasn't much of a performance penalty if it helped with stability. 33.3cps. Wow.

    Then again, that was lightning fast compared to the DEC LA-36 teletype and 110 baud modem that someone gave me when I was about 12. At the time, there were rules about not connecting anything but phone company property to telephone lines, so acoustic coupled modems were de rigeur. I even remember seeing an acoustic couple 1200 baud once. My 110 baud modem was junked Bell Telephone equipment, so it was apparently exempt from the telephone line rules, and I used it when I didn't want to be interrupted. That was the slowest thing in the world. But when you were reading your e-mail (on 17" wide paper!), at least there was _never_ any spam. You could put your e-mail address up on your Archie server, or even post it in newsgroups, and there was never any spam.

    [hums theme from All In The Family]

    Every now and then, I'll fire up my old VT-100 and login to my FreeBSD box. I'll use vi at 300 baud just for the nostalgia.

    Got a job for a Toronto computer geek who used to have a UUCP e-mail address? Click here! [glowingplate.com]


  • Shees. You young whipper-snappers and your need for high-bandwidth. When I was young, we had no-bandwidth and we liked it. To transport files, we used disks, cassette tapes, cards and whatever else we could find. Delivering the file to another office gave us an excuse to get out of the office and flirt with the cute receptionists. The drive accross town meant that we could take a long lunch... pay the 5 cents and get a large soda... just don't spill any on that disk!

    I bow to the master. I thought I was crotchety, talking about my new-fangled UUCP e-mail address and teletype conversion kits for IBM Selectrics. But you are the master.

    www.glowingplate.com [glowingplate.com]


  • I was, however, involved in a development project that required video overlay. The chip of choice was the TMS9918 because it was the only one on the market that even claimed the ability.

    Well, we have to make a distinction here, then. Was there a suffix on the chip number?

    I assure you, once you use a sync separator circuit and recombine it into the video stream, the TMS9918ANL, which was the version in every TI-99/4A (as opposed to the TMS9918 in the /4), the video overlay works just fine. I've even done it on a variety of consoles, including the older black and aluminum ones.

    Early problems I had were having the video bleed through the solid overlay colors. It was easily fixed by reducing the video gain using (urk) a potentiometer. I did this after the sync separator/recombiner stage because I guessed that if I was overdriving the video (white clip and bleed-thru), I was probably overdriving the sync.

    The TMS9918ANL - which was the chip in every TI-99/4A I've ever seen - never so much hiccupped. Unless the VCR was mistracking... the TMS9918 was pretty strict about timing, and could't lock very far away from normal fh and fv.

  • TI-99/4A Kicked Butt! (Score:3)

    by BigBlockMopar ( 191202 ) on Tuesday July 24, 2001 @10:55PM (#63174) Homepage

    Is there someone using that? Because my brother smashed mine with a hammer.

    Not the PEB or the expansion cards!

    Having worked on a lot of industrial and military computer systems, I have yet to see another computer that has cast aluminum cases around its expansion cards.

    32k of RAM in a cast aluminum card [glowingplate.com].

    And that was mounted in a card cage that is stamped of thicker steel than the side impact beams in a Ford Explorer. (No kidding.)

    The TI-99/4A came with a really bad BASIC. TI-BASIC was interpreted at runtime into "GPL" - Graphics Programming Language. It was a TI proprietary language that was used for most cartridges and stuff.

    TI had decided in 1979, when they released the predecessor, the TI-99/4, that home users wouldn't be interested in programming, so BASIC was poor, and an Assembler wasn't available until 1981. TI also thought that they'd sell the consoles for $99 each, at a loss, and make their profits on the peripherals.

    The processor was the same TMS9900 that was used in Patriot guided missiles. It was a real 16 bit CPU at a time when everything else had 6502s. They were really cool, too, because the CPU registers weren't actually on the CPU - they were in RAM. "Workspace Pointers" pointed to the location in RAM, and you could do a lot of really neat early multitasking tricks by using a routine called from the video interrupt to move the workspace pointer to a different location and therefore change your context in about 3 CPU cycles, versus the time it would take to move the information in all those registers. No protected mode, though. :(

    All the stock RAM was addressed through the video controller, a TMS9918, which had really cool features like 32 automatic sprites and a video overlay and genlock feature that TI never used in the home computer. The shared RAM was cheap at a time when 16K of RAM was a lot of money, and they felt no one would ever see the difference.

    The 32K RAM expansion and almost all of the other peripherals ran off the system bus, and had plug and play support that remains unmatched today. You plug in the card, and the drivers for the peripheral device are read from the ROM chip on the card at boot time.

    The TI User's Groups are still quite active for a machine that was discontinued in 1983. You can actually get a couple of TI links from my webpage at www.glowingplate.com [glowingplate.com].

    The TI-99/4A wasn't portable like the TRS-800 Model 100, but it was a highly cool little machine in its own way. Especially with that neat 1970s futuristic black and brushed aluminum case.

  • Re:TI99A (Score:4)

    by BigBlockMopar ( 191202 ) on Wednesday July 25, 2001 @12:07AM (#63175) Homepage

    For those of you old enough to remember - the TI99/A could produce ANY tonal frequency via simple BASIC program...

    And a lot more! Three voice sound chip with a noise generator while most computers simply used a flip-flop to toggle the speaker on and off.

    I made a touch-tone dialer program for it back when I was in elementary school. Loading the program from cassette kind of defeated the speed and convenience purpose of the dialer, though.

    A friend of mine at the Ottawa TI User's Group took my idea a step further. The Speech Synthesizer was a common TI accessory, and he incorporated my program as a subroutine into an application that would read a diskette or cassette tape file of telephone numbers and call them. The program would dial, wait 30 seconds for the call to be picked up, and then start reading a message. Usually, it was used to broadcast meeting reminders in the days before e-mail.

    Ahhhh, those were the days - when 16KB was a lot of RAM...

    Heh. I had a chunk of core memory kicking around. I pitched it when I moved to Toronto in 1996, but I'd really love to have it back so I could build a bunch of vacuum-tube sense amplifiers and actually interface it to an ISA bus. I'd need to sit down and get good at assembly language again before I could actually use it for anything. Maybe cache a very small HTML page in it just to have something cool on my webserver [glowingplate.com].

    Oh yeah, it was about 256 bytes of 12 bit wide core memory. (12 bits wide, it was probably off a 1960s PDP-11, but I don't know for sure.)

    Hmm... 12AX7s are common and cheap dual triode tubes. I must have a hundred of them; that collection should handle almost all of address bus side of the matrix. [Does quick calculation of heater voltage (12 volts) times 600mA heater current per tube times 128 tubes = 9,216 watt space heater, just for the address bus logic. Shelve that idea.]

    anyone remember the Radio Shack Color Computer (CoCo)?

    Sure! Rockwell 6809 processor, same as the Vectrex vectored video arcade system. That was a pretty cool processor, it blew the 6502, 6510 and 8088 right out of the water. Very cool little chip. It was thge predecessor to the Motorola 68000.

    I wanted a CoCo 50, which was the little micro Color Computer. Tiny thing with chicklet keys, but unlike the Timex-Sinclair 1000, the CoCo 50 had color and 5k of RAM. But I got the TI-99/4A for my 10th birthday instead, and never looked back.

  • Of course, it has also been discovered that a previously-unrecognised signature exactly matches Bill's.
  • pc's are built to brake down after 3-4 years on purpose so you buy another one and billy can sell you windows and office yet again. Its called planned obscelence. Most OEMS also know that most users trash theiry comptuers anyway for the latest and greatest version of windows. So they view quality as an added cost. Same is true for coffee makers. My mother was upset because even the best of the best brake after 5 years. She is now using a 20 year old one because they weren't designed to brake on purpose back then. I myself in the last 6 years replaced 2 of my computers because they kept braking down beyond repair. I serviced both of them numerous times. I bought from cheap asain dealers so I learned my lesson. Never do this. It pisses me off. I was hoping to buy an apple cube because they had no fans which are the cause of %80 of failures. If it needs a fan then its overclocked in my book.

    I know many orginal Macintoshes from 84 as well as amiga's that never broke down because they were built with quality. Long and Behold the great pc weeniee generic crap came in and monopolized the market. I bought a state of the art intel motherboard and a case/pwersupply from power& cooling associates which make the best stuff on the market. I only hope it lasts. I have been running it for over a year and only had one freeze up. If it brakes then I will switch to a mac or sparc box. Running Linux of course. I want better.

  • ...it boots in a split-second.
    Why can't laptop manufacturers make a better memory-backup so you can just switch it on? Even suspend-to-disk takes perhaps 30 seconds to resume. Not a very long time, but it does make it useless for that sudden brilliant idea you need to jot down somewhere.
    By the way - if you want to see what the Model 100 was like, check out the Club 100 [the-dock.com]. They are quite active, sell hardware, modify the machines and you can download software. There are emulators too.
  • Bagh. fwc, you don't realize what a luxury that you had!

    I'd rather wait 1 hour for a 100kB program than have to walk 2 hours uphill each way to work to copy the program onto a single 10" floppy disk, only to find out that sunspots erased the floppy on the way home.

    Shees. You young whipper-snappers and your need for high-bandwidth. When I was young, we had no-bandwidth and we liked it. To transport files, we used disks, cassette tapes, cards and whatever else we could find. Delivering the file to another office gave us an excuse to get out of the office and flirt with the cute receptionists. The drive accross town meant that we could take a long lunch... pay the 5 cents and get a large soda... just don't spill any on that disk!

    but I digress.

  • This comment doesn't apply to the Model 100 machines, but rather to 300 baud modems in general.

    If the line was good, you were in good shape at 300 baud -- you couldn't type that fast at all. On the other hand, if the line was bad, you'd get lots of resent blocks (over and over and over and over) using Xmodem or (god forbid) Ymodem, and then sometimes typing a document over again would be MUCH faster.

    What would drive you nuts was when you were sending a 100k or 200k document and after hours of Ymodem you were on block 157 of 158 and the carrier would be dropped. You'd pretty much eat the furniture.

    Zmodem was supposed to fix this with some kind of resume function, but it never worked right for me and Zmodem in general always seemed a little flaky...

    Then the 9.6k and 14.4k modems with error correction came out and all of these concerns went away...

  • I loved my M100! I want another one! (Score:3)

    by aussersterne ( 212916 ) on Tuesday July 24, 2001 @09:18PM (#63189) Homepage
    I wrote my first two books on a Tandy TRS-80 M100.

    It was a beautiful device -- instant on, instant off (much more instant than, say, Windows CE) with no moving or hot parts and a basic, no-frills set of applications (the text editor was what I used most). The characters were large and easy-to-read and the keyboard was actually full-size and felt more or less like any old keyboard on any old computer. The whole thing was no thicker than a textbook (and much lighter) and I used it continuously and transferred the data to my PC using a null modem cable.

    Then in 1995, it was stolen right out from under my nose at a busy public library -- the power was on, I was in mid-sentence and stopped to turn around and grab a reference from the table behind me. When I turned back, someone (one of about twenty people nearby) had taken it, and by the time I got around to saying "hey, somebody just stole my computer!" the selection of people in the vicinity had completely changed and it was long gone. Old, maybe -- but obviously still in demand.

    After that happened, I decided it was time to update my mobile computing, so I got a nice high-end 486 color notebook computer made by AST and ran Linux on it. These days I'm running a ThinkPad 760XD with Linux.

    But I'm nowhere near as productive, in sheer page count or imagination, as I was on my M100. I've begun to price them on eBay once again...
  • One of the best uses was as a teletype emulator. It could do 45-90 baud, 5 bit, 1-1/2 stop bit code. It was great for Ham Radio field days. Didn't need to lug a big power hungry MOD 28 Teletype out into the woods.
  • Luckily for Microsoft, Gates beat the journalists, coding in the new Visual Basic. The guy hadn't coded for over a decade....Microsoft products may suck, but at least Bill can code.

    What a crock. Firstly, he beat a bunch of tech journalists. That's like being impressed if an NBA coach beat a bunch of local sports beat writers at making free throws.

    Secondly, do you REALLY believe that Gates didn't do some coding before hand, if only to learn how Visual Basic worked ? If he HADN'T coded for over a decade, that would imply he HADN'T so much as used VB at all beforehand, which I seriously doubt (though other MS press conferences and such give me pause).

    Thirdly, I bet you that the task was hand-picked to highlight VB's qualities. Maybe it was to whip up a pane with a picture and a button which when pressed printed "Hello, world". If anyone picked another language it would take forever...with VB it would have been simple, but that wouldn't make Gates a good coder by any stretch.

  • Secondly, do you REALLY believe that Gates didn't do some coding before hand

    Of course he did. Wouldn't you? Whats that got to do with it anyway

    Well, YOU were the one making the big deal about how "Gates hadn't coded in a decade". So when you made the point I assumed YOU saw the original relevance - presumably because you thought saying so might go some way to show Gates' wizardry ?

    Even if he hadn't coded in a decade, I still don't know what significance beating some tech journalists necessarily means. Maybe they were journalists for something like a DDJ, but then again maybe they were journalists for a PC Week.

  • TI99/4A (Score:3)

    by hillct ( 230132 ) on Wednesday July 25, 2001 @03:48AM (#63195) Homepage Journal
    I had a TI99/4A back in '81. Damn things were almost as durable as the TRS-80 laptops. Stamped steel expansion case - heavy duty.

    The TRS-80 is the only <Grin> Laptop <Grin> that could survive military style repair procedures

    In the event of error, first, Drop from at least 5 feet
    If error persists, re-seat everything and call technical support

    They were nice boxes, and given the pricing on modern heavy-duty laptops, they were a steal - for their time.

    --CTH

    --
  • From the article:
    "It comes with something even more pokey: a built-in 300-bps modem that sends text more slowly then the average person can type."

    Really... most people type more then 562 words per minute?

  • Please, I'm not a spy! -- old Model-100 story (Score:4)

    by ediron2 ( 246908 ) on Tuesday July 24, 2001 @09:47PM (#63204) Journal
    The story:

    About the end of 100's commercial lifespan (PC laptops were appearing) I think it was PC Magazine whose regular humor column had a great story of someone going through customs in some 3rd-world dictatorship. His duffle was searched, and his gear led to a flurry of interest, lots of consulting with higher-ups in a language he didn't understand, and him imagining life in a dark cell screaming "Please, I'm no yankee imperialist spy, it's not even that good of a laptop! It's only got 16k!"

    Then, the head of security stepped up and said, in rough English "You have... very many... batteries". He had dozens for his extended trip and they thought he was black-market and hadn't even cared about the laptop.
  • Actually, there was unix for the TRS80 model 16. In my case, I took a Model 2 and added a hard drive and the M68000 borads from a model 16 (a lot of people at the time perfered running their model 16 boxen as model twos). Then I was able to load the machine up with Microsoft Xenix for the TRS80. Even in 1992 it hadn't been a supported configuration for half a decade, but Xenix was a more-or-less real System 7 unix, with a wretched c compiler and no networking to speak of. At one point Robert Dinse was running a rather large BBS in Seattle (Eskimo North) off of one of these, with a weird aftermarket (homebrew?) memory card that took him up to at least 4MB, maybe more. This supported hundreds of users total, tens simultaneously, compiling stuff, doing usenet, and basically being computer people back in the golden age. I will also note that when Eskimo North moved up to a Sun, they also aquired a 56k leased line, making them one of the first ISPs. It was also $12 or $15 a month, making it by far the cheapest ISP I'd ever met. Those were definitely days, if not actually the days.
  • They also had a really cool docking station with a pen based color printer that printed on cash register paper - very cool - had these tiny little pens. You could write programs, save them on cassette, print them out - I've still got min e(along with a Model 100)

    I remember working on a BBS for my Model 100 - just for kicks - it didn't really have enough disk space :) But it was fun and worked halfway decent. Cept my Mom kept complaining about the phone line always being busy!

  • I had one of these and wrote programs on it.

    Is there someone using that? Because my brother smashed mine with a hammer.

  • I stupidly traded mine to a friend who is a collector of outdated equipment. I have a KayPro that somebody gave me (complete with WordStar and DBaseII), but I've never turned it on. I'm hoping to trade it to my friend to get my old Model 100 back.

    The keyboard on that thing was absolutely magnificent. I used to sit in bed, BBSing till all hours of the morning. I even rigged a null-modem cable to connect it to my TRS-80 Color Computer running OS/9 and logged in using the M100 as a terminal.

    My Palm V is as close as I've gotten to the sheer indispensability of my Model 100. I miss it.

  • Once upon a time, Radio Shack tried to replace the Model 100/102/200 line with a dedicated word processor called the WP-2. In theory, it had all the necessary ingredients to be a successful replacement for the M10x line. In practice, it never sold well and was discontinued after about a year and a half of lackluster sales.

    It had a full-size typewriter style keyboard that was actually better than the M10x line had, featuring comfortable sculpted keycaps. It had an 80-column by 8 line display. It had excellent runtime on AA batteries. It had a parallel printer port (something the M10x family never had), it had a real serial port that could go faster than 19,200 bps. It just never sold well.

    Why? Well, I think the problem was the display. The 80-column width made the characters too small to see easily. If the machine had a higher-contrast display, the battery life would have suffered, but I think the display was too hard to read and that doomed the machine.

    Anything that's going to successfully carry on the Model 100's legacy needs to have a readable display above all else.

    Oh, by the way. For people who'd rather just click on a link than copy'n'paste URLs, here are the websites mentioned in the post to which I'm replying:

    www.alphasmart.com [alphasmart.com]
    www.quickpad.com [quickpad.com]
    www.perfectsolutions.com [perfectsolutions.com]
    www.dreamwriter.com [dreamwriter.com]
    www.calcuscribe.com [calcuscribe.com]
    Alphasmart review [sfsu.edu]
    Quickpad review [webreviews.com]

  • no modem? no problem (Score:3)

    by p3bf ( 459005 ) on Tuesday July 24, 2001 @09:11PM (#63239) Homepage

    I recall quite fondly my TRS-80 days (although it was a Model I); Loading and saving programs via cassette tape, those little stars winking. Programming in assembler; The first blocky graphics. Back when people had to use their imagination rather than lull people with graphics.

    I remember transmitting a program to someone over the phone line by holding up the output of my tape recorder to the mic on the phone, and his holding the mic of his tape recorder to the earpiece of his phone... a primitive modem of sorts. It took a few tries to get it going, but we eventually got it transmitted with no line errors!

    With some sadness I had to part with my TRS-80 Model I parts recently. It follows the trend of parting with my Data General Nova, and my PDP-8 (built into a metal desk with four 8" floppy drives).

    While I defected into the land of the Apple ][+ around those days, I never lost my taste for the TRS-80, back when men were men and we hand assembled and disassembled for fun. Sure, we did it too on the 6502, but damn we had easy access to DISK drives of all things, with those apples. Where's the fun in that?

    I've got some great TRS-80 emulators, so good that it just wasn't worth keeping the original hardware. There's a TRS-80 in the Smithsonian, so I can always visit if I get nostalgic.

    READY
    >

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