24k #2 -- Goldilocks

Just before the New Year, we teased 24 reviews of 24k machines for 2024. By ‘we’, though, I mean the marketing department here at Paper Tiger. The product team was split. The Product Classic group insisted that the original proposal for 16 X 16k for 2016 was somehow still a winner. They run Windows 2013 and still think it's pretty fresh. The New Product group felt that 32 x 32k for 2032 could handle the demanding business applications of tomorrow but left room for some fun on the weekend.

I'm a lowly stringer in the OK Product group but I think 24 hits just right with our core Gen X readership – just like OK Soda. 24k is a bit of a weird size. Unpretentious, but not the Goldilocks middle way between value-priced 16k machines – are we still calling those machines? – and 32k roller derby bruisers. No, the 24k machines are mostly the forgotten 2k - 8k leftovers upgraded to 24k. This made sense in some ways. As RAM prices tumbled, you could shove these machines out the door with a cheap upgrade and have it cost less than digging the hole to bury them in. I'm looking at you, intra-terrestrial E.T.

For today's installment, we have a machine that captures the boozy malaise of the era perfectly. The Tandy TRS-80 Model 102. In a jigger, combine:

• one part American capitulation to the Japanese for a machine built by Kyocera, not Tandy
• two parts '80s badge engineering for this Kyotronic 85 machine rebadged "TRS-80" but almost totally incompatible with every other TRS-80 peripheral and application
• two parts 8k upgrade kit to bring the original Model 100 machine up to 24k

and pour into a highball glass over four AA batteries. Stir with the temple of Bill Gates' Big 80s plastic eyeglasses. The TRS-80 100/102 are said to be the last machines into which Bill poured his soul. It's a recipe for a cocktail that you can nurse at the bar for up to 20 hours on those AAs. Think of it as the 1983 Byte Magazine version of a rum-and-OK-Cola.

Speaking of the bar, this machine was a journalist's second-best friend. If your particular '83 hole-in-the-wall had been upgraded to a modular telephone jack, you could file directly from your stool using the Model 100's built-in 300 baud modem and built-in productivity applications, back when catching keystrokes in order and saving them for later counted as productivity.

Teasing aside, the Model 100 was a seriously cool machine and the untethered portability made it one of not too many small machines from the era that made sense to use professionally. It really was a machine. It was more programmable out-of-the-box than many machines today and they were used as serious scientific instruments around the world. In fact, they were so fit for purpose that the Jane Goodall institute continued to buy refurbished models for field work after they were discontinued.

I recall them as the cyberdeck of 1983. To see one at the time was almost as cool as running into The Guardian's DC correspondent. It may have even been possible to get a two-for-one. Wait a minute... The cyberdecks of William Gibson's Neuromancer didn't even exist until 1984. Maybe the Model 102 was so cool that it became the cyberdeck.

Whether or not they were immortalized, they were nearly obsolete at the time of their introduction. Laptops, more or less as we know them today, were around the corner and a machine like the limited and less-than-compatible 100 wouldn't be popular again for a long time. Maybe they never did become really popular again. The devices which might best be called descendants are odd hybrids between the limited functionality of a PDA and the full keyboard of a laptop. That's a class of machines like the clamshell Apple eMate that paired a full keyboard with a Newton, and like today's "distraction-free writing" terminals – devices like the Freewrite and the now-defunct AlphaSmart. As for the Intel 8085 processor, the Model 100/102 had an Oki CMOS clone that provided the superior battery life. I would say that this was the high-water mark for the 8085, but NASA might disagree with me. The radiation-hardened variants went higher. In 1997, the 8085 was the brains of Sojourner, the Mars Pathfinder rover.

Though Sojourner's mission is over, the Model 100/102 may now be as serviceable as it has been for years. Buy one on eBay, dead or alive, and there's a community ready to support you. Maybe 24k is sometimes the Goldilocks configuration after all.

This post pairs well with “Mr. Writer” / “Just Enough Education to Perform“ / Stereophonics / 2001.

Additional resources:

• Bunnie's 2010 project to remap the Model 100/102 keyboard from QWERTY to Dvorak
• The Tandy wiki hosts both the original firmware and a version patched for Y2K compatibility