#portable 100

[krjpalmer]

Portable 100/200/600 March 1986

The "Inside the Model 100" article illustrated on the cover of this issue was less general than you might think from the picture: excerpted from a book, it specifically described how the 80C85 CPU "communicated with the rest of the world" through input/output ports. There was an article that involved opening up the computer, though: the purpose of that was to modify the hardware so that nickel-cadmium batteries would recharge when the power adapter was also plugged in. (My family made that modification to our Model 100. While I did dismantle it myself not that long ago to extract the circuit board and mail it off for capacitor replacement, I have to admit that since switching to nickel-metal hydride batteries, I've been swapping in batteries recharged in a modern device instead of seeing what happens when the modification passes current through them...)

[krjpalmer]

Portable 100/200/600 May 1986

Portable computers in use "from Wyoming's rangelands to Iowa's barnyards" provided the cover story for this issue, even as Park M. Morrison's editorial mused on it lining up with a CBS Evening News special segment on "farmers down on their luck, on the brink of bankruptcy." A less weighty article compared memory addresses to make porting programs between the Model 100 and Tandy 200 a little less tricky.

[krjpalmer]

Portable 100/200 November 1985

Tandy's own entry into the "portable (battery-operated) 3.5-inch disk drive" space made the cover of this issue. The feature article, dismissing the Disk/Video Interface as "disastrous," concluded the Tandy Portable Disk Drive was "no Ferrari or Maserati but then, it's no Gremlin either." It did criticize the drive for putting just 100K of data on a disk, hooking up to the RS-232 serial port rather than the expansion connector underneath the Model 100, running at a slow speed, and having uninspired software treating it as a place to dump files and retrieve them from, but there was the promise of an improved operating system sponsored by the magazine itself. (Some of the other criticisms might have been due to the drive actually having been made by Brother and rebranded; in a different incarnation, it was hooked up to a computerized knitting machine.) Another product from Tandy, the ROM chip software "Interactive Solutions," was reviewed inside. My family made do without a portable disk drive, but we did have Interactive Solutions.

[krjpalmer]

Portable 100 April 1984

This issue's cover story was a bit less extreme than the cover might imply; it amounted to a "persistent dialer" program that, as in the movie War Games, could call "every number in town" with the right modifications but was intended for smaller, more legal purposes. The news section enthused about the number of sportswriters beginning to use the Model 100, including at Super Bowl XVIII, and the "Tandy Talk" column revealed an "Ultimate-One Computer" appropriate for the month...

[krjpalmer]

Portable 100/200/600 April 1986

A "seasoned traveler" provided tips on keeping your portable intact, powered, and secure through airport screenings in this issue. One project described how to turn an ordinary looseleaf binder and four D cells into a "battery pack that doubles as a protective cover." J.D. Hildebrand's editorial addressed reports about IBM failing to introduce a "high-end laptop in late January as predicted," insisting other equally high-end portables were struggling in the market (where the Model 100 and Tandy 200 were doing just fine) because they were "technologically just barely possible — not because anyone needed the capabilities and functions they provided". The magazine also happened to describe some unusual "April Specials..."

[krjpalmer]

Portable 100/200/600 June 1986

The cover story for this issue opened asking you to "Forget the hard-to-read screen. Forget about the need to carry a pound-and-a-half battery charger, turning a 9.5-pound baby computer into an 11-pound butterball. Forget about the slower-than-molasses disk drive." Microsoft Word on the Tandy 600 made up for all of that, although it wasn't quite "the full-featured Microsoft Word that Macintosh owners have grown to love." Tandy's earlier portables received attention as well through a review of an improved "snap-in ROM" (which came with a new program to command their portable disk drive that's still in use today to command modern equivalents of the mass storage device) and programs to create bar charts and pie graphs (even though they didn't have a "CIRCLE" command in their BASIC).

[krjpalmer]

Portable 100/200/600 January 1986

While this issue's feature article introduced "the interactive publication" via comments about the interactivity of computer games (and then asked you to turn to further back in the magazine), the program itself appeared to be more of a bulletin board system with "telephone answering machine" elements. It was also something of a work in progress. Another article talked about how to get the Model 100's modem dialing through a "cordless phone," closing by wondering about a "connection through a cellular radio unit."

[krjpalmer]

Portable 100 September 1983

The first issue of this TRS-80 Model 100 magazine (twice as thick as the debut issue of PCM) was from the same publishing company as The Color Computer Magazine. Along with an article enthusing about how much attention the portable computer had generated in the months since its introduction, its features on telecommunications included a column from someone at CompuServe explaining how the online service offered 128K of storage space to each subscriber, four times the maximum RAM of a Model 100. (He didn't use the term "the cloud.")