Back to the future: the TRS-80 Model 100
Posted: Tue Jul 21, 2015 3:54 pm
http://arstechnica.com/information-tech ... model-100/
I owned one of these myself. It had a freaking built-in 300 baud modem which was luxury back then. It allowed me to dial into bulletin boards, The Source and Compuserve from anywhere (I was a Megawars addict back then which was completely playable on one of these). One of the major attractions was that the BASIC interpreter was completely compatible with the IBM MS-DOS BASIC interpreter, and I was writing a lot of basic apps for the IBM PC back then for work. You had to take into account that you only had 8 lines of text on the display, but it worked fine in the DOS command line era. It allowed me to do some coding on the go back then. Some people even used them for early inventory control in our offices (unofficially), although management kept telling us that "computers would never replace good old fashioned paper inventory ledgers". LOL!
I had a friend who was a freelance journalist for the Miami Herald who loved the Model 100. It was THE journalist's laptop before there were laptops. The only other viable portable computing option at that time was a 'luggable' like the Osborne.
I loved my Model 100.
BTW: Anyone notice the "tablets" in the SyFy mini-series "Ascension" looked like tricked out Model 100s? Even down to the white plastic case.
I owned one of these myself. It had a freaking built-in 300 baud modem which was luxury back then. It allowed me to dial into bulletin boards, The Source and Compuserve from anywhere (I was a Megawars addict back then which was completely playable on one of these). One of the major attractions was that the BASIC interpreter was completely compatible with the IBM MS-DOS BASIC interpreter, and I was writing a lot of basic apps for the IBM PC back then for work. You had to take into account that you only had 8 lines of text on the display, but it worked fine in the DOS command line era. It allowed me to do some coding on the go back then. Some people even used them for early inventory control in our offices (unofficially), although management kept telling us that "computers would never replace good old fashioned paper inventory ledgers". LOL!
I had a friend who was a freelance journalist for the Miami Herald who loved the Model 100. It was THE journalist's laptop before there were laptops. The only other viable portable computing option at that time was a 'luggable' like the Osborne.
I loved my Model 100.
BTW: Anyone notice the "tablets" in the SyFy mini-series "Ascension" looked like tricked out Model 100s? Even down to the white plastic case.