Rescued TRS-80 model 100

I kind of don't believe this. So while walking by one of my favorite "recycle piles" today I spotted this stylish bit of black vinyl sticking out amongst the AGP video cards and DDR1. Thinking there was no way it could be what I thought it might be, I pulled it out for a look:



Well:

...yep.

Aside from some stickers, it's in amazing condition too:


So that was a nice find, right! But wait, there's more:


...much more:





Here's everything I found in one shot:

This stuff survived 30-odd years, tidily stored, in this condition, until somebody threw it out.

Of course I had to open it up! I was looking for suspicious barrel batteries, and I found one:



...fortunately it was fine! It was only measuring half a volt though, and I really don't trust these things, so I took it out anyway.

(Now that I look closer that capacitor right above it doesn't look so hot.)

Other than that the innards of this thing look pretty tidy:


I did find one nasty leaky battery in the floppy drive, but it hadn't damaged anything so I yanked it & cleaned the corroded bits off the plastic with a cloth.


Out out!


Apparently the Energizers were made before they started putting expiration dates on AAs. These made a bon-voyage to the battery recycle bin.

(continued next post)

SO... the million dollar question - does it work? Of course it does!



BTW if you want a closer look at those reference cards taped underneath, here's what they say:


They are "up-side-down" compared to the data sticker so that they can be read when lifting the computer from the front (bottom of the keyboard) - well thought through.

So that was my huge find of the day; naturally I am exceedingly pleased with it. I don't think I've ever owned a Tandy anything before but this is certainly one of the coolest ones in my opinion.

Now that I have this thing what can you do with one of these? Any interesting demos / games / software hacks floating around? Should I bother to replace the barrel battery?

Nice find! And with goodies to go with it! You are lucky they used Energizer batteries instead of Radio Shack ones. The red "free" batteries we used to hand out with the monthly card had the nickname 'acid bombs' and for good reason.

The 100's are nice, I keyed in a little program to cross match watch batteries with Radio Shack catalog numbers. That way when someone came in for a watch battery (or other odd battery) I could show and amaze them with an add on. "Would you like a portable computer to go with your batteries...?"

Once again, sweet find! It looks they even have the cardboard drive protector and it looks well taken care of!

Where can I find these "recycle piles"?!:wow:

Hard to imagine someone just threw these out. Truly a case of "One man's junk is another's treasure".

Nice score!

There are a number of games for the Model 100. The sideways Tetris (Tiler?) is fairly amazing considering the limits of the Model 100. Spend a few minutes downloading everything that looks interesting at Club100 and enjoy.

One useful item to download is the Tandy PDD driver for MS-DOS. It will simplify transferring what you download. You will need an older DOS machine with serial port to use the driver. The PDD format is completely weird. The disks needed are standard DSDD 3.5" disks: the type MS-DOS formats at 720kB. Mark the label that the disk is for a PDD because normal 3.5" drives can't read it.

The coolest thing about the Model 100 is the incredibly long battery life. Difficult to show that off with a demo though.

Interesting about the disk format - I guess they tried all kinds of crazy stuff back then. Can I prepare images on a PC and then write them with 'dd' or is the format too esoteric for even that?

Anyone know a good programming guide to this thing? Something that covers hardware access, port addresses, writing to vmem, etc.

xjas said:

Interesting about the disk format - I guess they tried all kinds of crazy stuff back then. Can I prepare images on a PC and then write them with 'dd' or is the format too esoteric for even that?

Anyone know a good programming guide to this thing? Something that covers hardware access, port addresses, writing to vmem, etc.

Click to expand...

Not dd; attach the PDD to the serial port of the PC and copy files across. The PDD disk format was single sided, 40 tracks, 2 sectors per track with about 1250* bytes per sector using FM (single density) encoding for a total of 100k. None of the common PC floppy controllers are capable of understanding that.

* Not checking exact size but it was not a multiple of 512.

Some links to get you started
http://www.club100.org/library/libdoc.html manuals galore
http://bitchin100.com/m100-oss/archive.html some games and utilities with source code
http://bitchin100.com/wiki/index.php?title=Model_T_DocGarden

^^ Sorry, misread your earlier post. I thought you were talking about a serial->serial driver. Yeah hooking the Tandy drive to a PC sounds easy enough, I've got a nice FreeDOS workstation that even has a 25-pin serial port which will do the job. Have been poking around on Club100 already, seems like lots of great info there. That open source library is boss too.