TRS-80 Model 100.

[unbibium]

I've seen a TRS-80 Model 100 once, in the eighth grade.  Someone brought it in.  It looked great, by 1992 standards.  You'd turn it on, select your application, and start typing.  The screen wasn't so hard to read.  Definitely a better computer than that $100 XT laptop I couldn't afford at the used computer store at the time.

I discovered while listening to the Daily Giz Wiz that this thing had a battery life of, like, 20 hours, on double-A batteries.  It may even be lighter than most modern laptops.  It helps to be an 8-bit system with a non-backlit screen, I guess.  And it is a much beloved machine. 

If you could get email at 300 baud anymore, the stereotypical grandmother would consider it the perfect computer.

Does anyone have any experience with this device, and perhaps some stories of how it was used?  Did anyone use that 300 baud modem for BBSing?

Comments

[kirkjerk.livejournal.com]

Well, famously it was popular with journalists... and you've probably seen the wikipedia page for it.

My personal experience, however, was with a much later, but in some ways similar, model, Tandy 1100FD. It was bigger and clunkier, had a great gameboy-ish 4 shades of grey CGA screen, and just a 720 3.5 floppy (other PCs tended to be a bit tempremental reading that kind of disk.) I bought it for like 500 in 1992 when going off to college, and was the only one geek enough to take notes with a laptop during class.

The text processosor was very decent, and ready to go fairly instantly... I finally replaced it in 1995 or so w/ a tiny slim 486 b+w laptop that had a trackball, so I could make diagrams in my notes without resorting to ASCII art.

Conceptually I like the 100, though it seems like the screen is way too small.

This page has info on both these machines and some similar ones. this ebay auction lets you see more of the screen.

And of course now I'm jonesing for the Dujitsu P1510D, which only shares "size" with the Tandy 100... but it has a touch screen.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

My friend Richard had one when we were in high school. I coveted it. In some ways it and its Kyocera-based cousins were the most elegant laptops ever made. The Wikipedia article describes it as resembling a PDA in some respects; but it was a PDA with a full keyboard better than the ones on most modern notebook computers.

One of the applications was Microsoft BASIC, so if you were satisfied with that, it was a hackable machine.

One very, very popular accessory for it was the bar code reader; organizations would, I believe, use it for warehouse inventory.