Reporter's Best Friend - the Model 100

Okay, let’s take a break from the chronological tour of Washington, DC area stories and jump in to something more up-to-date:  my TRS-80 Model 100 (I actually have two of them – one was a gift.)

The Model 100 served me well for 15 years, and they were important years.  I bought the Model 100 as I was leaving Chicago for Washington, DC.  I wanted a new gadget to occupy spare time and learn more about pre-personal computing.  This portable computer ran BASIC and was limited in what it could do.  For a reporter, it was an ideal tool – it had a very simple word processor (no, it couldn’t do “track changes”) and a smoking 300 baud modem.  That meant I could write a TV length story and send it back to the station for a show producer, writer and editor to see what I had written.  It would take only 10 seconds or so to upload the story through an acoustical coupler (cups that fit over the handset of a payphone.  We also configured our live trucks with a phone jack so we could try file transfers via a cell signal.  Cell file transfers were not always reliable. The error rates were high.

I used the Model 100 for probably 8-10 years longer than I probably should have.  In the 90’s, reporters were starting to use new windows laptops that could do so many things the Model 100 could not – yet I dutifully carried the Model 100, tech guy that I was.  Their machines had menus, games, touchpads, and screens that were beautiful (not so beautiful outdoors), and battery life that was unpredictable.    The Model 100 ran on four AA-batteries, lasted two weeks on a set (always kept a spare set) and an LCD screen you could see in direct bright sunlight.  It did what I needed it to do – nothing more, nothing less.   

My little 100 was never a plaything, never a Swiss army knife for a multi-tasker, or anything beyond just a useful tool that was reliable. And, like a Timex, it took a licking and kept on ticking.  It was tossed around cars, live trucks and airplanes.  When I used it on a desk, I would often angle it up by sticking a couple of sawed off pencils in the recesses for the back screws.  That made the screen easier to see.  We were fancy in those days.

The Model 100 (followed by the Model 200) came before the need to be connected full-time.  Both models were the workhorses of news and sports people in the field, at the park.  See, write, and send it to the Mothership.  The stories my Model 100 helped me tell……