A (Techy) Labor Of Love
I don't restore cars, old homes, antique farm equipment, steam engines, or airplanes. But I have this insane liking for the Radio Shack Portable 100 or 102, the first (and I mean FIRST) successful commercial laptop computers. At about $1,000 when new, it had 32K (not megs, not gigs) of memory and could store about ten pages of plain vanilla text. These units were the journalists' best friends in the mid 1980's. They could write a report from the field, find a phone line and upload the story to the newsroom with the 300 baud built-in modem! Need to do it on a pay phone? There was an acoustic coupler that fit on the phone handset! Those were the days...
The operating system was designed by a young guy named Bill Gates, and had the faintest hint of what was to come later. Like Windows, when you selected a file, the appropriate application was launched to run it. There was no mouse, but also no troublesome “command line.” Files were displayed on a grayish LCD screen and you highlighted them by moving the up/down left/right buttons. Read Bill Gates comments on the unit at http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/comphist/gates.htm#tc35.
Another reason the machine was the darling of journalists was it was easy to type on (great keyboard) easy to read (big characters on the screen) and you could store information on an audio cassette if needed. Later a spendy little disk drive was offered.
I still have a 102, and it works great. But the slow modem is useless, the serial port connection is obsolete and the (optional) external disk drive formats disks that cannot be read on a modern drive...if you still have one. These are truly the “Model T” of laptops!
So, like the Model T, the unit is dead, right?
Not if Rick Hanson (left), a handful of Portable 100 enthusiasts, designer Kenneth Pettit, and some Chinese engineers have anything to say about it!
Rick is the long time owner of “Club 100” a portable 100 user group. He says all Model "T" computer owners are considered members of Club 100 — there are no dues other than "goodwill." The goodwill, and indeed the "wealth and power" of Club 100, is vested in the unselfish sharing of knowledge and experiences between the members.
And now Club 100 offers a device, the NADSBox, that enables their beloved laptops to keep on serving a useful purpose in the 21st century. It is a gadget that will allow what is created on the Portable 100 to be stored on common “SD” cards (the kind cameras use) and then read by modern computers.
The
NADSBox plugs into the Model 100
serial port and emulates the venerable Tandy Portable Disk Drive. You
then transfer files using standard tools just by removing the memory
card from the unit and plugging it into any modern computer with a
memory card reader.
I spent $195 for a device that will save the data from my 1980's vintage Tandy laptop to a modern day SD card. It was worth every cent. Now I can sit in Starbucks and type away, while the college students gape in amazement as they unpack their iPads. My unit was made before they were born!!!
Got a unit that you loved and want to use it again? Refresh your brain on all things P-100 at http://www.club100.org/. Rick also has screens and parts for units that have seen better days.