[ Retro Scan of the Week ] Give The Gift of TRS
December 14th, 2009 by Benj Edwards
Red Wizard, your life force is running out.
I’m presently so sick that I’m about to keel over and mop the floor with my head, so you’ll have to provide your own commentary on this one. All I know is that the TRS-80 Model 100 is awesome, I have two of them, and I took one apart for PC World last year.
And look — Christmas theme!
Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever bought someone a computer for Christmas? Tell us about it.
December 14th, 2009 at 7:03 pm
Hm, my father bought me Atari XE, not exactly for Christmas, but before it, so it may be considered as a Christmas gift. And one year later I bought myself disk drive for my Atari. It was Polish SN-360, very rare model even in Poland. And still, after 18 years, it works like new one. 🙂
December 15th, 2009 at 9:59 am
I have two Model 100s myself. They are WONDERFUL machines. They’re also somewhat easy to obtain, so I highly reccomend that anyone that collects vintage computers and uses them on a daily basis gets one of these. Two great periphrials just came out, and it will soon be able to use the Model 10X as a portable CP/M machine!
December 15th, 2009 at 10:23 am
What a great machine. Before the Gameboy, this was the eater of AA batteries in my house.
December 15th, 2009 at 10:35 am
That sounds cool, Jake. Can you tell us more about those two new peripherals you mentioned?
December 18th, 2009 at 11:06 pm
If buying for one’s self counts, I bought myself an Asus eee 701 4G two years ago.
December 21st, 2009 at 11:13 am
The two periphrials I mentioned are the REX, and NADSBox. The NADSBox (New Age Digital Storage Box) is a serial SD card reader, that emulates the Tandy Portable Disk Drive (2). You can read and write to a standard SD card, and I think it will work on machines other than the M100, M102, and M200. The REX is a device that fits in the Option ROM slot of the Model 100, and allows for multiple banks of emulated RAM or ROM in flash memory. More info about both can be found at http://www.club100.org .
January 6th, 2010 at 6:41 am
Yeah, I bought my dad a computer for Christmas one year. He and I went down to the comp store and picked out an affordable computer. My dad is near 70 years old and had never used a computer. When we got home I put it together and turned it on. After the next 2 hours of instruction my dad finally was able to power the comp up by himself. I went home that day thinking, oh no, what have I done…. what a a waiste of money. However, within 2 weeks my dad had taught himself how to surf the internet and set up and receive email. He is still no comp wiz by any stretch but is able to use the computer for much more than I ever thought possible after that first day.