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Hardware

Remembering Radio Shack's 1983 Training Film For the TRS-80 Model 100 (fastcompany.com) 72

Posted by EditorDavid from the fine-and-Tandy dept.
Fast Company's technology editor Harry McCracken is also Slashdot reader #1,641,347. He contacted us Thursday with a story about Radio Shack's Model 100 -- and a rare training film from 36 years ago: Radio Shack's Model 100 wasn't the first laptop -- but it was the first popular one, and an innovative machine on multiple fronts. It was also the last computer to ship with Microsoft software personally coded by Bill Gates.

I recently came across an internal training film intended to help Radio Shack staffers explain the Model 100's benefits to potential customers. I've shared it -- and some thoughts on the system's importance -- over at Fast Company.
The article calls it "an even more important computer than it generally gets credit for," noting portable computers at the time weighed a whopping 24 pounds -- and required a wall outlet to run. So a four-pound PC that ran off batteries and could fit in a briefcase "introduced people to mind-bending ideas such as using a PC on an airplane" -- even if it only had 8K of memory.
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Remembering Radio Shack's 1983 Training Film For the TRS-80 Model 100 More

Remembering Radio Shack's 1983 Training Film For the TRS-80 Model 100

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  • 8K of memory (Score:4, Interesting)

    by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Sunday May 19, 2019 @01:43PM (#58618934) Journal

    "8K of memory"

    Holy crap. Even my Atari 800 had 48K.

    Pretty amazing how far we've come.

    I remember when the idea of owning an actual gigabyte of HD space was ludicrously silly, it was like saying that you owned your own Space Shuttle. It was so far fetched that we'd make jokes about it.

    • Re:8K of memory (Score:5, Informative)

      by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Sunday May 19, 2019 @01:51PM (#58618968)

      I wrote payroll and inventory systems which ran on a TRS-80. Yes, they were ludicrously simple by today’s standards... and slow as molasses in January. But you can do useful things with a small amount of memory and some sort of storage.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Some still in use microcontrollers don't have RAM at all, just registers. 8K RAM is still generous in many embedded systems.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by mspohr ( 589790 )

      The first hard drive I bought was 5 MB! This was a big advance over the 5" floppy (360K).

      • The first hard drive I bought was 5 MB! This was a big advance over the 5" floppy (360K).

        And now, brand new 1Tb drives are selling for under $50. It's insane.

        • My first PC (clone) that had a hard disk was 10 Mb.

          A computer wiz at work told me about using Debug to execute the HD controller firmware in ROM at address 8C something something. I discovered the interleave was 1:1 and the computer was taking like 4 or 5 revolutions of the disk to read a sector. Changed it to 2:1 and then it only took 2 revolutions to read a sector, greatly improving HD performance.

          We've come a long way since then.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • DEC had a time sharing OS on their PDP/8 with similar specs. That was with core memory!

      • FOCAL. I remember bootstrapping it uo with octal codes on the keyswitches to get my FOCAL programming assignments done. There were also FORTRAN assignments for that class that we had to punch onto cards and bring to the batch terminal in the library building.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hawk ( 1151 )

        That overstates things a bit: a base pdp-8 could address 4k of 12 bits; it could eventually have another 8 of these ranges.

        You needed a couple for the later "time sharing" that it would acquire.

        It was targeted to be a device to support a single engineer; the multi-user was an odd thing to do with it when you got down to it (but it didn't take much more for an -11 with not much more spect to be multiuser)

        hawk

    • You were lucky. My VIC20 had 5K of RAM, and just 3.5K available if you loaded the BASIC interpreter. The 16K expansion was $80. Today, $80 will easily buy you 16 GB of RAM [newegg.com]. That's a full 6 orders of magnitude of capacity per dollar, in just 25 years.

      I also remember when I bought my first "big" hard disk, in 1994. It was 200 MB for just $400. I couldn't believe you could get a MB of storage for just $2... Now you can get 2 TB for $40 [newegg.com]. Five orders of magnitude swing in the price of storage.

    • 8k standard, you can expand them up to 32k, and there are ROM cartridges available if you want more native programs than come on it from the factory.

      Yes, I mean present tense, but these things were also available in the 80's.

  • Hello Kyocera (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Going_Digital ( 1485615 ) on Sunday May 19, 2019 @02:41PM (#58619168)
    Kyocera should be getting most of the credit here, as they created it. All that Tandy Radio Shack did was recognize it might be a good seller and arrange for a Tandy badged version to be sold in the USA. Finding products from other markets and selling them into another market is of course a useful function but Tandy Radio Shack had no responsibility for the hardware or form factor.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Kyocera makes some very solid products that seem to last forever. The TRS-100 was typical. I've owned their printers, copiers, phones and many other devices that were only sold in Japan, and have never been disappointed.

      They even introduced a dual screen phone back in 2011, called the Kyocera Echo. Way ahead of their time! I still have a very old Kyocera flip phone with the original battery. It just won't die, and I'm too cheap to give it up.

  • Back when "Empire Strikes Back" came out, a friend of mine went and bought a Model-100 so that he could work on his term paper while waiting in line. After the movie, he went home and connected it up to a personal computer and moved the file from the Model-100 to the PC and from there to his mainframe account so he could print it using roff.

  • Battery terminals have a little corrosion. I also have both the 3.5" floppy drive and the Disk/Video Interface behemoth that has the 5.25" drive. I had the Lisp (or was it Forth?) program for it that was fantastic: anything you did in it would crash the computer. I might even have the original receipt and box, don't recall off-hand.

    It was a lovely device for its day. I used it at school for typing notes, I carried it in a briefcase and rigged up a 6v lantern battery that would power it for a couple o

  • I used one of these all summer when I was 15. I was a Sysop for a bulletin board and went on holiday. A fellow sysop had one and lent it to me to keep checking in on my BBS. I perched in a phone box, with the optional acoustic coupler, and dialled in diligently each day.

    Fantastic device!

  • Back then only women knew how to type anyway.

  • I sold TONS of them at an RS store in Santa Monica (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TechnoGrl ( 322690 ) on Sunday May 19, 2019 @05:19PM (#58619944)
    The start of my computer career was at the Shack in '82 where I was a RS Computer store manager (fml). I sold a TON of those things to LA times reporters and other reporters and writers in the area. The idea of an integrated modem and word processor that you could carry around in your backpack was (back then) utterly amazing. Once I saw the demand for those things I knew that what would eventually be called laptops would be the way the industry was headed.

    8K of memory is laughable today but that's about seven or eight double spaced typed pages of copy (oh stop laughing) which, again, back in the early 80's was incredible. For comparison, just about 10 years earlier the PDP-8/s computer we used in high school had 8K of memory and was the size of a small fridge so being able to carry around something like that in your briefcase was a revolution.

    Don't EVEN get me started on the Radio Shack TRS-80 pocket computer - google it :)

  • I was a law student in 91-93, and I had one of these to take notes in class. In every class, I was the only person with a laptop. I used only the word processor, then at night dumped the notes via printing to serial cable to capture them in my 512k 'fat' mac back at home. It was great. It lasted for days, and did everything that I needed. The battery lasted forever. Looking back, it's funny the comments I would get - 'are you cheating?' 'is that allowed?'

    A few people that I knew were simultaneously pl

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hawk ( 1151 )

      I beat you by a few years :)

      January 88, and it got dumped nightly from my Tandy 102 (which had 24k) to my 128k Mac. I don't think 8k would have gotten me through a typical law school day . . .

      Battery life was much shorter using nicads, so I came with a couple of spare clips of four. Rather than 20 minutes warning when they ran low, you got 20 seconds. Some folks modified them to take a fifth battery to get a full 6v, but this would actually have *shortened* battery life for the cmos of the era, by increa

  • I had a boss who was an ex Radio Shack manager. He wanted me to use a Trash 80 to run-up and test printers.
    Trouble was it couldn't go fast enough to fill the printer buffers to fully test circuitry using the RS Basic.
    I replaced it with an early IBM PC clone running test applications developed in F83 Forth, which was the business.

  • Kind of neat at the time. Although my first PC was the TRS-80 model 1. I also had their color computer. Then got a Commodor 128. Ahhhh the good old days! Spent many hours typing in code from magazines.

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