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The Tandy Model 100 was the MacBook Air of the 1980's. Debuting in 1983, it weighed in at 3lbs and ran on 4 AA batteries. It included a word processor, BASIC, and a telecommunications program (along with a 300 baud modem) that allowed you to compute on the go.
This unit came from TechRepublic contributor Rex Baldazo.
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The Model 100 still carried the TRS-80 brand. It was the last computer from Radio Shack that did so.
The Model 100 was the first truly portable computer and was labeled as such.
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Like many modern laptops, there was a keypad built into the main keyboard. You just pressed the Num key for a Numlock to enable the keypad.
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Right side view - here you can see the DC jack along with the On/Off switch and contrast knob.
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Rear view. Here you can see the 25-pin RS-232c port. This allowed the Model 100 to communicate directly with almost any device. There's a parallel printer port next to it that required a unique printer cable. Next to that is a DIN plug for the modem and a cassette player.
The modem was an internal 300 baud modem. This jack would allow you to connect directly to a wall outlet or using a set of acoustic couplers.
The cassette port allowed you to save programs and data to a standard cassette tape player.
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Left side view - Here you can see the port for the optional bar-code reader. The two switches were for the modem.
The first determined if you were directly connecting to a phone jack (DIR) or if you were connecting to a phone using acoustic couplers (ACP).
The second switch determined if the modem was to answer the phone (ANS) or if it was calling out (ORIG).
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The bottom of the unit. The plate at the bottom is where you add memory to the Model 100.
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Battery door open revealing the Model 100's Power Source - 4 standard AA batteries.
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Here's the serial number for our unit.
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Our Model 100 comes from Japan, unlike most laptops today which come from China.
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This switch controls the onboard backup battery. If the main AA's lost power, the backup battery would save data for a few days until you replaced them.
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Model 100 programs were built in ROM. It was instant-on. No booting and no hard drives.
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January 2, 1900? Yup.
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The onboard Basic is from Microsoft. Bill Gates helped write the code for this version of Basic. There's a whopping 4789 bytes of memory available for programming.
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You set the date in Basic, but as you can see the Model 100 is not Y2K compliant.
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This unit has 8K of RAM, of which just over 5K is free.
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Text is the onboard word processor.
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Filenames are limited to 5 letters, even more restrictive than DOS.
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Text in action. Nothing fancy. No formatting. As you can see, the letters are large and easy to read.
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Here's the Telcom program for dialing out using the modem. The setting is M7I1E: 10pps
M is Manual dial
7 is for 7 bits.
1 is for the stop bit.
E is for Even Parity.
10 pps stands for 10 pulses per second. Its to imitate a rotary dial telephone.
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The Scheduler program. There's not much to it.
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The Address program. It merely searches a text file you create.
The Tandy Model 100 was the MacBook Air of the 1980's. Debuting in 1983, it weighed in at 3lbs and ran on 4 AA batteries. It included a word processor, BASIC, and a telecommunications program (along with a 300 baud modem) that allowed you to compute on the go.
This unit came from TechRepublic contributor Rex Baldazo.