Some of you might remember the Apple IIc teardown I did for PC World back in March. Now it’s June, and my workbench is back in the spotlight again. This time I dissected the venerable TRS-80 Model 100 laptop computer, which happened to turn 25 this year. Below, I’ve posted an excerpt from the slideshow. I hope you enjoy it.

Twenty-five years ago, Radio Shack released the first wildly successful laptop computer in the United States. The TRS-80 Model 100 was simple, rugged, plentiful, and reliable, selling over six million units during its eight-year life span. With ample battery life, light weight (about 3 pounds), compact size, instant-on capability, and a small suite of built-in applications, the Model 100 served as the portable computing workhorse of its day. Bill Gates’ also ranks it as one of his favorite computers of all time, in large part because he and a friend wrote the firmware it uses.

The transistor — need I say more?

Let’s give a big round of applause to the electronic component that made our current computer revolution possible: the transistor. Here’s an advertisement from RCA touting the benefits of solid state transistor technology from a time when it was still novel. 55 years later, we’d be cramming 300 million of these onto a single piece of silicon smaller than a penny. And Microsoft Word still runs slowly.

Discussion topic of the week: What was your first computer’s CPU clock speed?

If you use this image on your site, please support “Retro Scan of the Week” by giving us obvious credit for the original scan and entry. Thanks.

I don’t know if anybody out there knows this, but some years ago, I created a music site called Request-A-Song.com (RAS). My brother Jeremy and I wrote original songs based on visitor suggestions, recorded them, and put them up on the site in MP3 format. We usually treated serious requests humorously, and humorous requests seriously, which thoroughly confused everybody (Hence RAS’s amazing success, and why you’ve no doubt heard of it many times). Sadly, our heyday was before the Digg, YouTube, MySpace, and ubiquitous blog explosion, which would have undoubtedly helped us promote our music and unique concept.

I’m only mentioning this now because it deals with something at least slightly on-topic for VC&G — computer history. Mike (aka Dr. Macenstein), over at the Macenstein blog, recently put together a video for my tongue-in-cheek song, “Ellen Feiss Makes Me Hot,” which I released back in 2003 (yes, almost five years ago). It’s about the famous Mac switcher who appeared in an Apple advertisement around the time. Essentially, people thought the commercial was funny because Ms. Feiss looked like she was stoned while filming.

(By the way, I should probably note that I had no idea Ellen Feiss was 15 when I recorded the song. It’s also written from the point of view of a fictional admirer, and acknowledges how Internet obsession can be creepy in the lyrics. I was looking to hitch the song onto a popular meme about Feiss on the Internet at the time.)

[ Continue reading Ellen Feiss Music Video – An Ode to the Mac Switcher » ]

Click above to see the full ad.

In this week’s Retro Scan, we’re looking way back to 1953. Many computers in the 1950s used monster magnetic drum storage units, like the one you see above, as working memory — ala RAM — until the faster and more adept core memory came along. Using technology similar to a cylindrical hard disk, these beasts were understandably slow compared to their non-mechanical successors.

If anybody out there ever worked with one of these, we’d definitely love to hear from you.

Discussion topic of the week: How much RAM did your first computer have?

If you use this image on your site, please support “Retro Scan of the Week” by giving us obvious credit for the original scan and entry. Thanks.

Vintage computing shows up in some of the unlikeliest places. And in this case, it saved the day.

According to a recent Associated Press article, a 340 megabyte 2.5″ Seagate hard drive from the ill-fated space shuttle Columbia survived the craft’s fiery break-up and crash to the earth back in February 2003.

A data recovery service called Kroll Ontrack managed to recover most of the data on the drive, which dealt with an advanced xenon experiment. Oddly enough, Jon Edwards of Kroll credits the formatting and data storage methods of the MS-DOS operating system for allowing him to recover the data:

However, at the core of the drive, the spinning metal platters that actually store data were not warped. They had been gouged and pitted, but the 340-megabyte drive was only half full, and the damage happened where data had not yet been written.

Edwards attributes that to a lucky twist: The computer was running an ancient operating system, DOS, which does not scatter data all over drives as other approaches do.

Three cheers for the FAT file system. I guess that NASA (or the experiment’s designers) kept their drives pretty well defragged.

It’s amazing Kroll recovered any data off of the platters at all, with the drive’s external case scorched, its dust-proof seal compromised, its heads driven into the platter surfaces, and its internal components desoldered by the intense heat.

I’ll wager that the platters were composed of solid aluminum, like hard drives of old. If the disk had been a more recent model — you know, the kind with platters made of glass — the fragile discs might have been shattered from the stress of the explosion and hard landing.

Researchers recently published the recovered data from the shuttle’s xenon experiment in a science journal, as was originally intended. It’s satisfying that some good science came out of Columbia’s last mission, proving that the crew’s tragic journey wasn’t completely in vain. For that, in a strange and lucky way, you can thank Microsoft.

A couple weekends ago, I made the requisite annual trek to RARSfest, my local hamfest of choice, which takes place on the NC State Fairgrounds. You might remember my in-depth slideshow on a similar hamfest adventure two years ago. Well, this year I decided to take a few shots of the ‘fest again, and I thought you might enjoy them. So hop in the HamCar, and we’ll take a quick ride through RARSfest 2008.

[ Continue reading The 2008 Hamfest Report » ]

They put that blue streak there for a reason.

It may seem like online dating is a new thing, but it stretches back farther than you’d think. Case in point: American People/Link, an early dial-up relationship service using Teletext — a much hyped (but little used) online graphical display technology at the time. I’m not sure how successful the service was, but that guy looks pretty happy. If anybody out there ever used People/Link, we’d love to hear from you.

Discussion topic of the week: Have you ever dated someone you met online? Beyond that, how have computer networks changed your social life?

If you use this image on your site, please support “Retro Scan of the Week” by giving us obvious credit for the original scan and entry. Thanks.

Hot off the virtual PC World presses comes my latest volley of vintage nostalgia. This time I covered celebrity computer endorsements.

William Shatner, Alan Alda, Bill Cosby, Isaac Asimov, and other celebrities promoted certain brands of PCs in the early 1980s, and this PC World slideshow surveys the topic well, with eleven scans straight from the vintage source material. And just to warn you: any references you see to man-boobs came directly from the Great Editors in the Sky, although my original text was no less wacky. After all, if it’s good enough for Shatner…

Front cover of Supercomputer by Edward Packard (1984)

While looking through some old boxes a few weeks ago, I stumbled across my brother’s large collection of vintage Choose Your Own Adventure books. These books, as a series, were very popular in the early 1980s. Bantam published over 180 different Adventures from 1979 to 1998.

Each Choose Your Own Adventure book is similar to an adventure computer game. You read a few pages, and then you’re faced with different paths that your character can take:

If you free Danny from the barn even though Uncle Grog might catch you, turn to page 23.
If you give up and throw your SuperTorch in the hay, turn to page 40.

The outcome of the story depends on your choices, and every book contains multiple endings.

One book in my brother’s set stood out from the rest: Supercomputer, by Edward Packard (1984). It’s an interesting artifact of the popular conception of computers at the time, echoing common 1980s fantasy themes involving 500 lb. CRT-display machines achieving sentience, starting a nuclear war, or simply doing all your homework.

[ Continue reading [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Choose Your Own Adventure » ]

For the last two years, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has toiled away in secrecy on a brand new computer system, which he announced today in a surprise press release. The machine, sure to stun the computer industry, carries the torch of the classic Apple II computer line and brings with it a massive installed user base. Wozniak calls his creation the Apple IIpc — a fitting name for a modern update of his venerable Apple II design that sports both a 2 GHz processor and full compatibility with all Apple II software and accessories.

In a special email to the vintage computing press, Wozniak laid out the details. “I’m emailing this to you frist [sic] because I know you’re the ones who supported me all these years,” he writes. “After all, I’m counting on you to make this new launch a success.”

A Modern Marvel

Powered by a new 2.0 GHz 6502-compatible chip from WDC, the IIpc will retain full backward-compatibility with both Apple II and Apple IIgs software. In a further nod to the past, the computer will ship with three Apple II slots (in addition to the three PCI-X slots on the board) and will include user ports for Apple II keyboards, mice, paddles, and numeric keypads. The IIpc will support memory up to four gigabytes, although Wozniak plans on shipping the first model with only 1GB of RAM.

Perhaps the biggest bombshell in this announcement deals with the IIpc’s new 64-bit CPU. WDC, suppliers of processors for the Apple IIc and IIgs in the past, developed a special chip specifically for this project called the W65T64 Terbium Pro. Long thought to be vaporware by the computer press since it had no known application, the Terbium Pro has finally materialized, although it’s still in the late prototype stages.

“I’m extremely pleased with WDC on this project,” Wozniak writes. “Unlike modern emulation methods, the W65T64 runs Apple II code natively at 2.0GHz, along with more advanced software.”

The IIpc was initially designed as a drop-in replacement for the Apple IIe motherboard, but Wozniak soon realized that the antique IIe case and power supply would severly limit his design’s capabilities. He has commissioned a completely new all-in-one case from Jerry Manock specifically for the Apple IIpc. Manock, an Apple veteran, previously designed the Apple II, Apple III, and Macintosh cases. “Jerry and I work together like magic,” writes Wozniak, “and he’s got an incredible design for a new case that we’ll be testing soon.”

Apple’s Take

So what does Apple, Inc. and Steve Jobs think of all this? “Every time I talk to Steve, he tells me they still receive over 5,000 calls a day at Apple asking for an upgrade to the Apple IIe,” Wozniak writes, “So he’s happy that I’ll be getting them off his back.”

In exchange for permission to use Apple’s trademarks for a limited-run, limited distribution project, Wozniak had to sign a contract saying that he would handle any and all support issues that might arise. Apple even issued him his own support number, 1-866-866-8668, which satisfies his love for phone numbers with repeating digits.

Regrading trademarks, Wozniak felt it was important to stick to his roots. “I thought I’d stay with ‘Apple II’ as a basis for the name, because my machine is the next step in this long family of computers,” says Wozniak. And what about the model name’s two-letter addition? Wozniak explains: “The ‘PC’ modifier stands for ‘private computer,’ since it’s designed to be used by one person at a time, in other words, by yourself.” He continues,”I though about calling it the “Apple IIrf” — for ‘really fast’ — but I figured people wouldn’t take it seriously.”

Release Plans

According to Wozniak, The Apple IIpc will be available for sale on his website by “fourth quarter 2008” and will retail for $1666.66. But there might be delays. “Aside from the case we’re working on, the W65T64 is really the bottleneck in terms of getting this thing off the ground,” Wozniak writes. “The chip is going into production in June, so until then, I can’t launch.”

Wozniak and Manock formed a new corporation to distribute the Apple IIpc called Wozniock Computers. According to Manock, Wozniak has been waiting years for the opportunity to design something new that people will enjoy. “This is the project that Woz would have worked on at Apple if he hadn’t left the company in 1985,” says Manock. “I really hope people love using it as much as he did making it.”

[ Happy April Fools’ Day — This is not real. ]