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) sucessful commercial laptop computer. 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.
The operating system was designed by a young 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 greyish 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.
The machine was the darling of journalists, as it was easy to type on (great keyboard) easy to read (big characters on the screen) and had a built-in modem to send the story back to the press room via a phone line (Going on line was still a rarity back then.).
I still have one of these devices, and it still 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 But the slow modem is useless, the serial port connection is obsolete and the (optional) external disk drive formats disks that cannot be read on a modern drive...if you still have one.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, 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 this small group is about to offer a device, the NADSBox, that enables there 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's 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 know I want one for Christmas, and that will prove I am certifiably insane. I need to tell my wife I want to spend $150 for a device that will save the data from my 1985 vintage Tandy laptop to a modern day SD card. She will sigh, shake her head and say something like, “Well it is YOUR Christmas present, do what you want!”
Personally, I can't wait to have one of these storage units so that I can take advantage of the wonderful keyboard action of my old '102. Then I can sit in Starbucks and type away, while the college students gape in amazement as they unpack their Apple laptops. 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.