Surfing the web from a TRS-80 Model 100

[Dave Britten]

I know there are at least a few others here who own one of these.

http://arstechnica.com/information-techn...model-100/

Though the Model 100 appears to be too ill-equipped to do much more than act as a terminal for a Raspberry Pi (or other similar host). Probably not going to get a real TCP/IP stack and HTML web browser running on there like you can with a 200LX!

[Mike Morrow]

I have three of these purchased more than 30 years ago and used for real work purposes when I was writing emergency procedures and training drill scenarios in the US nuclear power plant industry. Its BASIC is double precision and it was powerful enough to simulate some plant response data used in drill scenarios. I even had a fourth-order Runge-Kutta routine that solved sets of differential equations and printed the results through its built-in parallel Centronics adapter. Third-party word processing allowed for document writing as well. At one time the 8-kByte memory modules were reasonably priced and an external 3.5-in. disk drive unit was available. There were two well-written books that explained the internal hardware and firmware and memory organization for those interested in that. I still have all of that and other stuff as well.

It was the first machine I ever used for dial-up bulletin board access with the built-in modem. I got a compuserve account for it...although even 32 years ago its 300 baud max speed was somewhat limiting.

It has a built-in real-time clock and calendar too.

It all seems hardly possible that so much could be done with 32-kBytes of RAM, 32-kBytes of operating system ROM (including BASIC), and a 2.4-MHz 80C85 that did not even have hardware MULTIPLY or DIVIDE instructions.

The Model 100 was an astonishing device in its time. It was immediately useful for real work right out of the box (if it was the 24-kByte RAM version...expandable to 32-kBytes). I believe it deserves status as one of the most important digital devices of all time...much more than does even the HP-35!

[Gerson W. Barbosa]

(08-06-2015 06:29 PM)Mike Morrow Wrote:  Its BASIC is double precision and it was powerful enough to simulate some plant response data used in drill scenarios.

Unfortunately a bug in the ATN function spoils the double precision for certain arguments. Try, for instance, ATN(1) and ATN(1/4) and see how many correct digits you get in double precision. An altered byte in ROM was the culprit:

http://www.hpmuseum.org/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/...678#171807