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By
Ray Barrington
Editor
I'm
no Ray-come-lately to this modem stuff, you know. Long before
you cyberpunks were surfing at T1 speeds, I was transmitting
stories to my newspaper from a laptop and modem.
On my beloved Trash-80.
It's hard for today's laptop luggers to realize what a breakthrough
the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 was. It's almost as hard
to describe.
Imagine a keyboard with an eight-line LCD screen - a watch
display on steroids - above it. Along the side were plug-in
holes for printers and the all-important modem cables. It
was made of the sturdiest plastic possible (for 1982, the
first year I saw one) and had the shelf life of a box of
Twinkies.
And - here's something new computers could try - it worked.
Every time.
Not
all my stories got home from the road, of course. But the
problem was usually at the jerry-rigged receiving end here,
not with me. And what power!
You could actually send your story from the built-in modem
at a blazing 300 baud. That's 300 bytes per second, folks!
(Or, by comparison, you could send a column this size over
the phone in the time it takes now to download all of Metallica's
music from Napster with a cable modem. Not that we recommend
that, of course).
And it even had a backstop for the really technologically-impaired
remote user. If trying to use the modem cables to hook into
a phone line was too much, just plug in the acoustic couplers.
These were two big rubber cups that fit over the ends of
a phone handset and allowed you to transmit stories over
a pay phone, if necessary. Try that with your Powerbook!
And if you think a snappy-color Imac is nice, consider we
had ways to customize our Trash-80s. Most of them involved
stickers. But there were also the colorful legs you could
give your machine by sticking pen caps in the bottom holes.
Granted, things do change in the computer world. But I used
a TRS-80 from 1985 until 1997, with my last transmission
a basketball story to another paper.
The next day, I read my story on the Internet. The corner
had been turned.
But when wrestling with a crashing Mac or broken Windows,
I long for that basic Basic, those eight clear lines, and
that TRS-80.
Ray Barrington is editor of Dot Com Magazine. Send flames,
virtual flowers and story ideas to him at [email protected]
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