Plugging Back In (a 32K revival)
Jul. 11th, 2016 07:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWhile "new" stuff for old computers stands out for not showing up every day, I can at least keep finding things I hadn't known about before as I turn back to fields left fallow. Not that long ago, for some reason I can't quite recall I started looking a bit more into that ur-laptop, the TRS-80 Model 100. My family has one of those computers, and it's certainly a lot easier to get going than any machine that requires a cathode-ray tube monitor to be carted around and plugged in, but the problem was that short of setting up the Color Computer we'd used in the 1980s or the now-antique Macintosh I'd tried out in the 1990s to link up over serial, I didn't seem to have any way to get the programs I did know about onto it save for the meticulous tedium of typing them in, much less any good way of getting anything off it before its batteries died in storage again. I'd known there were people who called it the "Model T" and could still put it to use as a text editor; I'd also known a gadget had been made up for it, as for quite a few other old computers, to simulate its old mass-storage portable disk drive but store that data on a camera card, thus allowing data interchange with modern networked computers with relative ease. The gadget had seemed a bit too expensive for whatever use or brief amusement I could imagine getting out of it myself, though, and after a while it seemed to sell out.
As I turned back to the information sites, though, I began to notice there were programs that would run on modern computers to simulate the portable disk drive, and to get the idea even I could figure out how to get those programs running. I already had a USB-to-serial converter I'd bought a while ago to link up my family's old Color Computer 3; the only piece of hardware I needed to add was a "null modem" cable with the right plugs on each end. When I decided the simplest way to get the first program I noticed compiled from source and running was to use the Linux partition on one of my portables, though, I couldn't seem able to get the converter to activate. Turning back to Mac OS X, I figured out I could install the "Mono" package to get a different program running, although it took just a little while to realise one particular instruction for resolving one particular error supposed the package to have been installed in a different directory than where it had wound up for me, no doubt installed using a particular package manager and not the "official" installer I had looked up.
With all of that sorted out, I just had to get back home, get out my family's Model 100 itself, and see if I really had solved all the problems. With all of the difficulties I'd had before, it was a little hard to imagine everything just working out as soon as the actual hardware was connected together... except that it did. I moved files back and forth with ease, and then I did have to consider a few more of the reasons I might not have put that much effort into this before. The Model 100's keyboard has a lot more "travel" to it than typical keyboards these days, and those hooked on that make a big deal of it, but somehow the feel of the keys wasn't utterly compelling to me. Too, I've begun contemplating in at least the past few years how the eight lines of forty characters each the Model 100 can display at once can show a bit more than two posts to Twitter; for me, it's not a lot to keep track of ideas with. One thing I was able to try was a "screen squeezer" program that sketches out characters in much fewer dots than usual, fitting ten lines of sixty characters each on the LCD; however, this means a performance hit when typing and runs the risk of overloading the portable's legendary simplicity of operation with machine language, taking all the files in memory with it. Still, even if I'm just as likely to write in longhand "away from a desk" as to type at one, it was a novel accomplishment at least as "useful" as anything else I can manage with different old computers.
As I turned back to the information sites, though, I began to notice there were programs that would run on modern computers to simulate the portable disk drive, and to get the idea even I could figure out how to get those programs running. I already had a USB-to-serial converter I'd bought a while ago to link up my family's old Color Computer 3; the only piece of hardware I needed to add was a "null modem" cable with the right plugs on each end. When I decided the simplest way to get the first program I noticed compiled from source and running was to use the Linux partition on one of my portables, though, I couldn't seem able to get the converter to activate. Turning back to Mac OS X, I figured out I could install the "Mono" package to get a different program running, although it took just a little while to realise one particular instruction for resolving one particular error supposed the package to have been installed in a different directory than where it had wound up for me, no doubt installed using a particular package manager and not the "official" installer I had looked up.
With all of that sorted out, I just had to get back home, get out my family's Model 100 itself, and see if I really had solved all the problems. With all of the difficulties I'd had before, it was a little hard to imagine everything just working out as soon as the actual hardware was connected together... except that it did. I moved files back and forth with ease, and then I did have to consider a few more of the reasons I might not have put that much effort into this before. The Model 100's keyboard has a lot more "travel" to it than typical keyboards these days, and those hooked on that make a big deal of it, but somehow the feel of the keys wasn't utterly compelling to me. Too, I've begun contemplating in at least the past few years how the eight lines of forty characters each the Model 100 can display at once can show a bit more than two posts to Twitter; for me, it's not a lot to keep track of ideas with. One thing I was able to try was a "screen squeezer" program that sketches out characters in much fewer dots than usual, fitting ten lines of sixty characters each on the LCD; however, this means a performance hit when typing and runs the risk of overloading the portable's legendary simplicity of operation with machine language, taking all the files in memory with it. Still, even if I'm just as likely to write in longhand "away from a desk" as to type at one, it was a novel accomplishment at least as "useful" as anything else I can manage with different old computers.