jwp (03/27/83)
Last friday (25-Mar) in the Wall Street Journal "Technology" section, there was a piece concerning a new notebook sized computer to be put out by Tandy called the "Model-100." It is supposed to have a 'reasonable' keyboard, an 8 line by 40 character LCD display and cost just under $800(!). This would make it more useful than the Epson (you could see enough text to do at least some word-processing) and much less expensive than the $3000 Teleram. Apparently the unit has some sort of serial/modem port allowing text to be uploaded to other machines. The unit is battery powered and completly portable. Unfortunatly, the article didn't have a picture of the unit... Has anybody seen a picture of one of these? Does it look like the keyboard would be useful to a fast touch-typest? Any ideas as to what software it runs? (hopefully this is -more- than just the calculator-that-runs-basic machine that Sharp, Epson and HP sell...I want something I can type notes on and do simple word processing with). Does it look rugged enough to stuff in your backpack with a couple books? I will digiestify the info if others are interested. John Peterson ...harpo!utah-cs!jwp (uucp) jw-peterson@utah-20 (arpa) jwp@utah-cs (arpa)
mckeeman (03/29/83)
I got a look at the Tandy 100 last week (eager salesman). I was impressed. You can carry it like a book. It has a plastic shell which will not stand a serious fall. And I suspect the LCD 8x40 display is also fragile. You can turn it off, then on again, and volatile memory sticks. They claim 30 days without needing to recharge the batteries. There is a socket for recharging NiCad batteries. It has basic, word processing, telecommunications and file maintenance functions (and that is all). The keyboard is tolerable although I would have to type a good deal slower than on my Vt100 or Z19. Everything seems to be menu driven. The editor is insert-always with right margin readjust whenever the contents of a line overflows. Much like the Wang Word Processor in insert mode. It has a cut-and-paste style of function, but little more. YOu might call it micro-mille-emacs if you wanted to paint a picture. The screen gives reasonable upper and lower case characters built out of little square LCD dots. The telecommunications feature has builtin autodial (claim, not demo-ed) and two functions UP and DOWN for up-line load and down-line load. You might call this mini-FTP. Basic was basic. I got it in a loop and found the reset button which took me out to the main menu. There is one RS232 and one parallel printer port in addition to the tele- communications port. The salesman assured me that the UP and DOWN file transfers would work over these too. With a full load of memory, it was nearly $1000. As I say, worth a look. /s/ Bill McKeeman, Wang Institute, Tyngsboro, MA 01879