Saturday, June 23, 2012

TRS80 Model 100 Portable Computer


Way back in 1983 the Great Lakes Geek got his first portable computer. It had a great form factor, nice keyboard and useful ports.

The LCD screen was only 8 lines and 40 characters across but that seemed plenty for the text-based BASIC programs you ran on the unit.

Maybe the best part of the ahead-of-its-time unit was the built-in 300 bps (yes 300 bps) modem. It made the Model 100 a favorite of journalists who could type about 10 pages of text into the unit and then plug into a phone line and upload their columns to the main office. 300 bps sounds excrutiatingly slow but when you just transferred ASCII character and plain text, it was surprisingly useful. The Geek spent a lot of time on the old Cleveland Freenet with that device.

The Great Lakes Geek recently uncovered his old Model 100 and shot this video of it. Ah, memories.



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