4 ms·

My Model 100 had a built in 300 baud modem. It was a modular plug vs an acoustic coupler, but still 300 baud. The nice thing about the terminal program on the

My Model 100 had a built in 300 baud modem. It was a modular plug vs an acoustic coupler, but still 300 baud. The nice thing about the terminal program on the 100 was that you could upload text files. So, on a BBS you’d enter New Message, then upload the text file. And it loaded just like typing it in. No Xmodem or anything, just “type it in”. Not a real problem at 300 baud. But the nice feature of the 100 was that even though it was a 40 column display, you could set the right margin to something like 78 or 80, and it would word wrap your lines. So it would format fine for the BBS. Hardly rocket science but just super useful. Also, 300 baud worked really well with a 40 x 8 display. Filled it up “fast enough” vs a 80 x 24 display. More than usable for BBSing in bed (difficult to do with a VT100).

walrus01 4y ago
As I recall from talking to older people, the model 100 with an acoustic coupler was an extremely popular solution for journalists to quickly file stories from remote locations/while traveling. All you needed was the model 100, a payphone, and the coupler.
- droid_mike 4y ago
  I worked at Radio Shack in the early 1990s. I was shocked to see that Radio Shack was still selling the Model 100s (acutually, model 102 by that time) as it was at least a 10 year old design by then. The manager told me that journalists still liked to buy them, because it was rugged, super portable, ran on batteries, had a great keyboard, and they could upload their text over a phone line. All I can say is their articles must have been very short as the memory limitations of the device were severe.
  - walrus01 4y ago
    I might not remember this right, but I don't think that the memory limitation was a factor, as they were often used with rudimentary dialup terminal software as a dumb serial terminal dialing in to a newspaper run system. The story would sometimes be typed live from the reporter's notes directly into the shell session of the remote (minicomputer, etc) system on the far end. This mean that even if there was 5-8KB of text it wouldn't be a problem. Then any formatting/line wrapping/typo and other mistakes from the raw submitted story would be fixed by copy editors from their local workstations.

walrus01 4y ago

As I recall from talking to older people, the model 100 with an acoustic coupler was an extremely popular solution for journalists to quickly file stories from remote locations/while traveling. All you needed was the model 100, a payphone, and the coupler.

droid_mike 4y ago
I worked at Radio Shack in the early 1990s. I was shocked to see that Radio Shack was still selling the Model 100s (acutually, model 102 by that time) as it was at least a 10 year old design by then. The manager told me that journalists still liked to buy them, because it was rugged, super portable, ran on batteries, had a great keyboard, and they could upload their text over a phone line. All I can say is their articles must have been very short as the memory limitations of the device were severe.
- walrus01 4y ago
  I might not remember this right, but I don't think that the memory limitation was a factor, as they were often used with rudimentary dialup terminal software as a dumb serial terminal dialing in to a newspaper run system. The story would sometimes be typed live from the reporter's notes directly into the shell session of the remote (minicomputer, etc) system on the far end. This mean that even if there was 5-8KB of text it wouldn't be a problem. Then any formatting/line wrapping/typo and other mistakes from the raw submitted story would be fixed by copy editors from their local workstations.