[PCWorld]

Post your comments for Inside a Classic: The TRS-80 Model 100 here

[audaniels]

I am a geezer/scientist-age 69-and an early adopter of portable computers. I bought a Model 100 as soon as it came out and traveled to scientific meetings with it and a little thermal printer for a couple of years. It was great. Before that I had KayPro II, a 25 pound "portable" with dual floppy disk drives. Lugged it to a meeting in Hawaii once. I have now been a Mac Fanboy (geezer division) for 16 years, through bad times and good. Have loved all my Apple laptops. Easy and fun and never any real problems. Laptops have empowered my professional life and helped me to be creative any place, any time. They still do.

[Wumbat]

I'm 42. I bought one of these beauties in my 20's when I was at college, and I loved it. Drove my lecturers crazy by using it in class. I sold it a few years later to the editor of the Sunday Tasmanian newspaper - I wish I had kept it. When I went back to University 7 years later I got a Macintosh DUO laptop, followed by a Macintosh Color Classic. There are computers you swear by and computers you swear at. The model 100, the Macintosh Color Classic and the Palm TX I use these days are in the first category, everything else is second category.

[BAA1948]

I'm a recently retired pastor with what's been a somewhat self supporting computer habit. I've had Commodore's Pet2001, 8032, 8096, Vic20, Commodore64, before moving into the PC realm in 1992. In the mid-80's I also bought a Model 100 after envying a friend's (from him I learned to put tiny rubber bands under the keys to stop the annoying clicking). I loved the portability of taking notes at a talk, a meeting, a parishioner's house, on vacation. I added a Super-Rom with better word processor, spreadsheet, etc. I still have it & turn it on once in a while. It seemed to get a bit unpredictable about hanging up, losing files, but it takes little space & I can't bear to turn lose of it yet.

[fwes]

Love this article, a trip down memory lane. I started home computing with a home-made z-80 system in 1978. Admired the Trash-80, but didn't appreciate who this Gates guy was (would become!). In those days, we really admired guys who could cram significant functionality into a few bytes of memory. That was the game!
Trashing Bill Gates is a national pastime, but we should acknowledge that he did great stuff on those small machines and boy, did he know how to get satisfactory performance out of VERY limited hardware. Yes, his systems crashed, but so does the modern stuff. If you can't crash LINUX, then you aren't challenging your computer. Providing useful functionality within the confines of the available hardware limitations was the Gates genius. That and creating defacto software standards by taking over the market. Remember the days when we had to use special programs just to transfer text files from one computer to another? Those were the days, my friend!

[audaniels]

Gates certainly was a skilled programmer in his early days. However, what Gates mainly knew how to do was turn operating systems into a huge business. The part that has always bothered me was that his MS-DOS was simply a blatant rip off of CP/M. How he got away with this legally, I don't know. My understanding of the business aspect is that IBM went to the CP/M purveyors first to supply the operating system for the IBM PC, but did not like the terms offered. Gates offered IBM essentially the same operating system under more attractive terms. Subsequently, he showed similar genius for taking other people's computing ideas and making more money with them than they could. In the last years, he was also smart enough to take his money and run when he saw the Microsoft business model he created was beginning to fail. MS is now stuck with the leadership of the strange Mister Balmer. It is nice to see Gates spending his money on worthy causes though, and I salute him for that.

[philusa]

Hey Guys. If any of you out there are collectors of the TRS80, I have a portable. It was working when last used, many years ago and I have the operating disk also. If any one wants it they can have it. Just pay the freight from me to you.

[bmacrae]

I am a retired 72 year old techogeek. I spent most of my career traveling around the world installing small computer systems to analyze data from the land resource observation satellites.
I was always fascinated by the ability to pack large chunks of computer processing capability into small packages.
My first introduction into this capability was the Sinclair calculators. I bought one that had a 1 Kb memory and provided Basic Plotting functions!
I bought the TRS 100 Portable when it first came out, adding adding an Expansion box with the incredible amount of memory (32 Kb). I carried the TRS 100, along with my trusty tape recorder (also useful for playing musical tapes) around the world with me on my trips to Japan, India, Egypt, Bangladesh, China,Brazil, Argentina, and other places to keep notes and print training plans. My life was made easier and much more productive by this unit.
I made the mistake of giving my 100 to a collector and wish I never did.

[bmacrae]

Dear philusa,


Do you still have the TRS-80 Model 100 portable? I would very much like to have it as I let mine go to a collector which was a hugh mistake! If you do still have it, please reply to:


Thanx,


bmacrae




Edited by MPHEnterprises - Please do not post your personal information within the forums for your own security and privacy.

[fwes]

The family history of DOS and CP/M is somewhat convoluted. They were all Collaborators or Pirates, take your pick. CP/M was originally developed for the Z80 chip. Many people, including Gates, developed variants for other processors and applications. There were some legal actions. The Wikipedia DOS article provides a succinct history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS

[bevhoward]

Wrote a ceramics kiln control program in 1984 (???) which continued to control my wife's kilns using a variety of 100's and 102's until the last one was replaced less than a year ago. They were ideal as the internal tape recorder relay controlled the 75amp mercury contactors, a "peek" watched for a switch closure from cone melt and the modem "called home" to report firing completion.

Historical points...

The 100 shipped with 8k of ram, upgradable to 32k... the 102 shipped with 24k upgradable to 32k

The keyboard was the failure point of most of our units... individual keys would go out along with "banks" of keys

The cost of the "Leatherette" case almost killed the Model 100 as the vendor did not want to include it in the original bid.

Beverly Howard, Austin, TX

[gregben]

A few niggles:
"The Model 100's brain, an 8-bit 2.4 MHz 80C85 CPU, is a simplified, low power version of the 8080 manufactured by OKI."
I'd rewrite the above as:
"The Model 100's brain, an 8-bit 2.4 MHz. 80C85 CPU manufactured by OKI Semiconductor, is a low-power version of the 8085AH processor manufactured by Intel. The 8085AH was Intel's enhanced replacement for the 8080A processor. It required less hardware to build a system than the 8080A and added new instructions."

[scottagreer]

Regarding the following statement:

+"Even if the Model 100 had a music program, you couldn't play
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on it. The speaker is capable only of beeps."+

Not true!

Get your hands on a copy of "Games & Utilities for the TRS-80 Model 100 by Robert Lafore, Ron Karr, Steven Olsen, Waite Group (1984)."

This was my Model 100 "Bible" for years.

You COULD play Beethoven's 9th on the keyboard using a "piano" program included in this book.

There are other audio generating programs in the book that utilized that crumby little speaker to do some rather amazing things.

I too loved the 100.

Scott