On 2001-01-07 [EMAIL PROTECTED] <Garry> said:
>Actually, I've lusted after one of these things since
>the first day I laid eyes on one. I've just never had
>the spare cash and enough of a reason.
They're not that hard to find, anywhere from free to $250 -- eBay,
Rick Hanson's website, various flea markets, auctions, garage
sales, hospitals, businesses that deal with barcode inventories,
attics, basements -- they made about *six million* of them, and
they continue (in my experience) to pop up in all kinds of other
unlikely places. If you look around, you should be able to find
one for little or nothing. Of course, Rick Hanson (owner of
"Club 100") has refurbished ones for sale (hundreds of 'em) that
he guarantees for 90 days, but ones in reasonably good shape can
be found elsewhere, if you're willing to snoop around just a bit.
I'd say that, of most of the SURVPCs lying around, the TRS-80 M100
is one of the easiest, well-known machines to locate and get
serviced. Tandy also has a number (1-800-843-7422) through which
you can still obtain a lot of help with parts, software or
information about them. There's loads of websites devoted to it.
As far as usefulness is concerned, if you just need a machine that
turns on instantly with a full-sized keyboard for text entry that
can later be transferred to another machine through a serial port
(with free utilities to do so), just like a routine PDA -- then
this is the perfect machine. You don't have to worry about floppies
or hard drives, since data is stored on an internal chip, and if
you want more programs/utilities for it, there's additional ROM
chips with supplemental programs that you can swap in and out of it.
Yes, they're still even talking about "burning" more such ROM chips
for it. Hacks just love this little fella and are constantly
tinkering with it to perform various automated tasks, etc.. And,
of course, you can write BASIC programs for it for specialized
tasks, and for this purpose, there are free programs available
to compile the special Intel 8085 chip code for it...
>I have always admired the integration they achieved
>in that thing. Folklore has it that it was the last
>serious programming project in which Bill Gates
>himself was involved. It's a credible claim, but I've
>never researched it.
It's true. I read an interview with Bill Gates that's recorded
at the Smithsonian concerning the code he wrote for it (don't
have the site handy, but it should turn up easily with a little
searching). Of course, he calls the M100 "pathetic" by today's
"standards", but what else would you expect him to say?
>I envy you a little. Enjoy your "Model-T" for me.
No need to envy. It's easy and cheap and plentiful.
Jerry [o:--] "The" IBM AT/5170 model 339 [--^~---] 9600kbps/30M HD
*1986 ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| [ =====_] 512k RAM - 8MHz
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