TRS-80 Model 100by Saul Bryan10th September 2005 © 2005, All Rights Reserved |
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A Place in History
The first "real" portable computer
You can have semi-serious arguments about this, but most people consider this the first personal computer laptop. Looking at the copyright in the manual, we are talking around 1983. I would have been about 15 at the time, and I had a similar machine is some ways - the Dick Smith System 80. It was a desktop machine with a built in tape drive, and displayed onto a (blurry) television, and even had fake wood panels - but that's a completely other story. The important thing, I think, is that it was about as fast and ran the same version of BASIC. So I grew up on this stuff, its in my psyche - I still use BASIC today, albeit in an advanced form.As I have just admitted, I never owned the Model 100 when it was first released - so how did this one come into my possession? Well, unlike my other "vintage laptops" (or "old junk" as my wife may reclassify them), it was not an eBay purchase. I was in fact, very kindly, given this unit by my current boss, John Matheson. He had kept the unit in near perfect condition, and had the manual, carry slip and amazingly a bar code reader. The only thing missing is the A/C adaptor, but that is ok. Thanks John!!
Similar machines to this include the Tandy Radio Shack (TRS) Model 102, Model 200. Also the NEC PC-8201, Olliveti M-10 and Kyocera-85. This page shows you these similar models side by side. I like the look of the NEC keyboard, with the direction keys in that layout!
Hardware
Overall
The "First Laptop"
The Model 100 is a reasonably compact, remarkably rectangular unit. It's roughly the size of a medium sized phone book, and considerably less heavy. Build quality is simple but robust - it feels solid. It is certainly not a burden to have it on your lap for a while, and unlike modern laptops has next to no heat out put and of course, no fan. In fact, nothing moves in this unit, as it has no hard disk drive or floppy drive either. CD drive? Ha! They were not invented yet. Does that start to put things in perspective?
Processor and Memory
The processor is the mighty, mighty 80C85 (8 bits CPU) at a glacial 2.4Mhz. Not GHz, that's MHz. Your average pentium 4 is running these days at, say, 2.8GHz, which is 2800Mhz. So its very roughly 1/1000th as fast, except that it not really a fair comparison, it's actually slower than that. How slow is it in "real world use" then? Well, you *can* see the screen redrawing, and any graphics can really grind, but overall its is fine. Really, it keeps up with your typing, and it does most simple basic programs plenty fast.As for memory, this machine came in a few different configurations - 8K or 24K, with an option to add a further 8K. I have the unexpanded 24K machine. This is enough for several BASIC programs, and a few short documents. People have written books on this machine, but a chapter at a time. Once you fill the memory, its time to upload the files via serial cable to a computer. Back in its day you could use a cassette tape for storage, but I doubt anyone would bother with that now. By the way, 24K is about 2% of a floppy disk. An cheap computer these days has an 80GB hard drive, which I roughly calculate is 3 million times more storage. Things have come a long way in 20 years, but there are implications on battery life, heat and noise.
LCD Display
To qualify as a laptop, it has to have it's own display, and this has quite a cool one. It is a monochrome LCD, without backlighting. The exact dimensions are 240 pixels across and 64 pixels down, which in the standard font is 40 characters wide and 8 lines deep. There is a dial on the right hand side which controls brightness and it goes all the way from all white to all black. Some people new to this unit conclude that it is not operational simply because they have not tried to adjust the brightness!
The display, showing the "Main Screen". Yes, there is a little scratch.
The LCD is only comfortably visible from a relatively small view angle, and the shot above is at that angle. The light has to be somewhat behind you as well, otherwise there is a tendancy for the characters to have an annoying "shadow" just offset enough to make reading the display tricky. The lack of backlight is perhaps the biggest issue, but of course if it had this then the battery life would not be what it is, which is superb. The other thing on the "Wish list" might be the ability to tilt the screen independently of the base, because sometimes the light isn't quite in the best place, and the only option is to tilt everything, which can then make typing uncomfortable.
The display is quite capable of turning each pixel on and off, so the graphics you can show on this can be quite impressive (for its age!). The BASIC language has a LINE command that makes it easy to draw from (0,0) to (239,63), for example. Of course, it is black and white people, so don't think this is going to replace a colour iPod or anything. Keep in mind the limited memory too - my unit has 24K, and the max was a 32K unit. Most JPGs images these days are at least that, and my Nikon D70 produces 1,000K+ files per photo (and up to 5 a second), so that may put things in another perspective. Fortunately, this is not a problem, because as I have already pointed out, this is not what this unit is for. Its primary purpose is to display text, with some simple graphics, and for this task it is fine.
Power
The laptop runs on either mains power or 4x AA batteries. The latter is what I use, and they are a bunch of rechargables that I used to use in my digital camera that died (sadly). The lifespan on batteries is amazing, topping out at about 20 hours usage. There is a red light that glows on the front when you are about to die - so save your work and replace the batteries. I will repeat that I think the incredible battery life is one of the major positives of this machine. It also has a user-selectable wait for auto-power off. That is, after a set time it will turn itself off. In this case, the ON/OFF switch on the side will be on ON, but the unit will be off - so to turn it back on you have to switch it OFF/ON again. No big deal, but might catch someone out I guess as it is not usual behaviour these days.I would like to tell a brief tale about the memory retention. I got this machine some time ago, and I'm talking a year or more. I put some AA batteries in, played with it, then put it in a cupboard. When I pulled it out it didn't power on, and I discovered that the batteries were starting to leak acid. Yikes! I got it just in time. Still, I put in a fresh set (of rechargables this time, that I *promise* to keep an eye on). Now here is the kicker - when I put new batteries in, after a year of being in the cupboard with leaking batteries - all the documents were still in RAM. I have subsequently changed batteries by recharging the set (outside of the unit) which takes about an hour. After this, the RAM is still fine. It seems fairly hard to lose documents by simply losing power, which is excellent.
Keyboard
The Keyboard - Nothing major wrong with it!
It is simplest if you do a quick check with the picture above and the layout of the keyboard that is no doubt in front of you. Assuming you are at a desktop machine, have a full sized keyboard that is more or less standard, things should be largely the same. The symbols above the numbers, are all correct. I use the splendid IBM Model M keyboard, which is old as the hills and misses the dreary Windows Key but is otherwise the benchmark. The main differences are -
- The caps lock key is in the wrong place, but is out of the way and "lockable" which I like.
- The ESC key is in the wrong place, and so the ~/` is missing. No huge loss.
- The "arrow keys" or direction controls are located with the function keys. These are irritating, but look at any modern laptop and notice it is not an easy problem to solve.
- It has a two line enter key and a small delete key. I dislike them both compared to the Model M layout.
- Other slightly odd keys like GRPH, CODE, NUM and CTRL are all in non-standard positions.
Ports
The back shows a little reset, RS-232 (serial), Printer, Cassette and where the modem would have gone!
In Australia, we didn't get the built in modem in our machines. I am not completely surprised, we have this organization called Austel, which does not allow any telephone equipment to be sold until it has been approved. Approval takes ages, costs a lot of money and involves donating a few units to be "tested" (which means they are destroyed to see how they handle overloads of electricity). So many companies don't bother doing all this, and us Aussies get 1/10th of the phone doodads in other countries. Oh well!
I have not shown the right hand side, which has the hole for the A/C adaptor to power the unit, the display brightness wheel and the all important ON/OFF switch. On the left hand side there is an SCR port, which is for the bar code scanner to plug into. Underneath, there is the cover to the 4 AA battery bay, a slightly suspicious "Memory Power ON/OFF" switch (the Manual says that it has to be on or else the unit won't work - so I say, why the hell have a switch then?). There is also the memory expansion cover. It's all well labeled, neat and tidy. The front has no ports. You are, in all seriousness, only likely to use these things - The battery bay, ON/OFF, the display contrast, and the serial (RS-232) port.
The Manual
The manual is excellent and covers everything really well
The manual is a work of art, and is worth a special mention and a thorough read. Seriously, it is years ahead of it's time, and is only bettered by some early Apple manuals I have seen. I tells you, if you are concentrating, all you need to know about the unit. It is quite factual and makes a better reference than a tutorial style book. Not great if you want to learn how to program in BASIC, for example, but good for looking up the exact syntax of the LINE command.
But forget all that -- have a look at the swanky gold rings on the binder! What a gem! (Sorry about the strange angle - it is a normal A4 size!)
Software
Built in Applications
It's not exactly rich in in-built software. You get : A single screen MENU page, leading to BASIC, TEXT, TELECOM, ADDRSS and SCHEDL. It can only handle two file types - BA (Basic) and DO (Documents). To me, the ADDRSS and SCHEDL are pretty much a waste of time and space. They approximate a diary and a simple database, but the implementation is very dodgy. I mean, you could perhaps learn how it works, but why bother, it is not that useful or all that well done and has not aged well. The stuff that counts is the text editor and BASIC.Word Processing
Think "Notepad" in a window with 8 lines tall with word wrap and you are not far wrong. There is no formatting, not even bold. TAB does work though, which is nice. Quite a lot of advanced features are there too, like block copy or jump to end-of-document. Some of it is a bit tricky to remember, but the basics work just as expected really. The only bummer is it makes the failings of the direction keys not being in the "inverted T" more noticeable.One thing I wish it did have is a spell checker. Why? Well, because my spelling is still hopeless. The Amstrad NC100 has this, and it is well done too. For a real "road warrior" that might upload a finished document to an employer, this feature would be missed I think. I am not a real "road warrior" though, and I can always spell check once I get to a real computer, so it is not a major deal for me. Keep in mind that a spell checker need a dictionary, and that takes memory - something the technology could not really do at the time.
BASIC
To me, a big appeal of this machine is its built in BASIC programming language. Why? Well, it is mostly historical - I grew up on this stuff. I find it fun to play around with simple programs, either by writing them myself or trying the efforts of others. There is a bit more to it than that though, you do need it to do some things like file maintenance. If you want to delete a file, the main menu can't do it for you, you have to use the KILL command in basic.In reviewing the BASIC language, here are some notes I made of things I found interesting -
- Variables can have long names, but only the first two characters are signigicant. So a variable TEST1$ and TEST2$ are the same.
- Variables names can not contain BASIC keywords anywhere in them. Watch out for OR and AND. A variable name like LAND$ is no good, and can catch you out if you do not know the keywords well.
- This basic is not case sensitive (it converts to upper)
- Variables have a type defined by the symbol after it, as follow : $=String, %=Integer, !=Single, #=Double.
- Strings can hold 0 to 255 characters and concatenation is done using +
- Most type casting is automatic except string<->number
- There are no functions or subroutine per say. You use GOSUB lineno then a RETURN, but there are not parameters
- Random function only semi-random, and repeats given the same seed
- You can load a program from the DO (text document) file, which can help if that is how you imported or wrote it
- The interrupt code is fairly cool, so it will stop what its doing if it gets a signal on the com port for example. This can be used for all manner of "computer controlled" functions. Thing home sprinkler systems based on timers and sensors, stuff like that.
- ctrl-break stops code in an infinite loop. Pause just pauses it, as you might expect.
- The ON command is similar to SELECT CASE. Well, sort of.
- This is Microsoft Basic, not BBC basic. This has meaning in light of my other two laptops which I will review soon. I prefer Microsoft Basic myself, partly because it is what I am used to. I also hate case sensitive languages with a passion.
Communication
Let me answer a simple question. "With one cable, can you upload and download documents and programs from the Model 100 to a Windows PC?". Assuming the PC has a serial port (25 pin or 9 pin, does not matter. This port is going in favour of USB so check!)... then YES! Windows even comes with the software you need - Hyperterm. Something free and functional in Windows - even more amazing, but true! There are other options of course, but it works. The cable you need is a "null modem" cable. When I asked for one at my local computer supermarket, the young clerk looked at me with an expression like I had just fed him a lemon. Fortunately, an older and more experienced clerk overheard my question and actually knew what I was talking about. One thing to watch for though - the Model 100 has a female 25 pin RS-232 port on it, which means you need a male connection. Most null modem cables have a female end. I had to buy a nifty "gender changer" which turns, as the name suggests, a female port into a male port. In summary, you might want to take your Model 100 with you to the shop to try the cable, just to make sure it fits. My cable cost me about AUD $15 plus another $10 for the gender changer.I think I will write a whole "step-by-step" page just on file transfers, as I found a few things out myself. There are a number of tips to make the thing work, and it can take a little while to work them out. It is cool to download some software, copy it to your machine and have it run in a few minutes - no typing! And of course, you want your document on the meaning of life you wrote to be copied to your PC so that it can be put on the internet and change the world. Or something like that! Rest assured, it can do these things, with a little (and I mean little) work. More on this when I get some time...
Online Resources
You might think that because this machine predated the internet by some years that it would not have much of an internet presence. Well, you would be wrong! There are a lot of people who have always liked this unit and have held onto theirs since new, but also quite a few who have just found one in the garage collecting dust and for the sake of curiosity put some batteries in and.. been amazed that it still works! Then gone online to see what it can do and this has opened the door to a whole new world of basic programming. Just because it is old, doesn't automatically make it bad, see?!| Club100 | Probably the first place you should start and may be all you need. A great resource. | |
| Case Mod | Case Mod for the Model 100? Sure, why not! | |
| Vintage Computing Webring | Have a look at some of the other old computer sites. |
Conclusion
What can you say? This is a true gem from the 80's, and holds its own even today in terms of simple usability.Final Review Rating : Superb!
Pros
- Amazing RAM memory retention
- Extraordinary durability (they are still going after 20 years!)
- Remarkably flexible
- You can still upload/download to a PC using a serial cable and terminal software
- Excellent keyboard
- Almost perfect Manual. I mean it - a lot of computer companies could learn a lot by reading it.
- Plenty of online resources and enthusiasts
Cons
- LCD hard to read in some light, and would benefit from being able to be angled.
- The cursor control keys are not in the "Inverted T" layout, which our brains are now all used to.