On 29 Sep 22 10:58:53, Walt Perko said the following to All:

WP> I never touched any vintage computers other than the Altair 8800
WP> (early 197
WP> before the "A" model came out) kit, a Motorola MEK6800D1 SBC, a
WP> Sol-20 kit
WP> built, and then in the 1980's a TRS-80 Model 100 at work I turned
WP> them into
WP> the worlds first Digital
WP> Fire Retransmission System.

Interesting!

WP> A guy recently gave me a Model 100 to play with which is what I'm
WP> doing whe
WP> get a lull in my other activities. It's fun to play with, but now
WP> I'm seei
WP> how limited it really was.

I looked at the specs for the 100 and I think I would pass at this
time.

I knew a few people that loved the Coco2 or 3... whichever one had the
ability to run OS-9. They were diehard fans.

Atreyu

I loved my M100's. I carried them to class to take notes. Since the keys were clicky and were a distraction to all the others in class, I put tiny rubber bands I got from a friend who worked at an orthodontist's office under each keycap to mute the clicking. At the end of each class i would dump my noted off to the PDD-1 disk drive. And it all ran off AA batteries. I eventually collected the entire catalog of M100 software that Radio Shack sold by hitting sidewalk sales at RS stores all over Dallas and Ft Worth. Plus Half Priced Books at that time had store in Richardson, Tx at the corner of Central Expressway (US75) and Beltline Rd called Half Priced Software of course. Someone had sold them a ton of those brown vinyl books with the tapes and ROMs in them. The last couple of pieces I collected from Software Etc in Allen, Tx. Software Etc also occasionally received pieces of M100 hardware that I picked up. In the last days of DOS I when I was an electrical contactor I had written an inventory and chargout package that ran on the M100 and used the bar code wand then downloaded the text file to my PC where a bridge program I wrote in compiled basic interfaced the data into my Friday! dbaseII runtime and into Star Accounting Partner II running on my Tandy 1000.

I sold almost all of my vintage collection when we were downsizing homes. I shipped out all three of my M100s, all 6 of my NeXT Dimension Cubes, my BeBox, my two Canon objectstations, some of my Sgi collection except for two Indy's, my 5 Daystar Genesis MP800's plus a 20' container of Sun, Sgi from Iris Indigo to Origin 200 to Visual Workstations, Mac's, Mac clones, Apple II, NeXTstations, Amigas. What I had left over was eventually scrapped when I couldn't find anyone who wanted it.

James

I also at one time had the Disk-Video Interface that held the M100 and moved the display up to a 40/80 column green screen monitor and had two 5-1/4" floppy drives for data storage. That was accidentally left at my former house when my first wife and I parted ways. I assume she trashed it like she did everything I couldn't carry off in the one hour I was allowed to retrieve my property from that house by the court order. The DVI box was originally priced at $799 but was closed out for almost nothing. I had a friend who was the manager of one of the local RS stores and got me one at a huge discount.

James

Hi,

I never married. I just never found a girl friend I wanted to stay with more than a few years ... I think my longest relationship was almost 4-years, but most ended by 2-years, so I never lost anything to a hateful shrew.

OTOH, burglars got a Sol-20 along with a VCR, stereo and TV just a couple of months after I finished building the Sol-20 so my experience there was mostly just playing Trek-80.

I replaced the Sol-20 a couple of years later with an Apple II computer and sure enough burglars got that too!

I hate burglars and it's the reason I don't want to own a gun, because I would use it.

..