Blast From the Past: A Tandy 200

It's now considered a museum piece. Back when I got it, the Tandy 200 computer was state of the art. Today, that's a scary thought.

The Tandy 200 was my first portable computer. I received it from the computer department at NBC News (GE) because I was doing a lot of work "on the road" and needed a way to send messages and dispatches back to the home office.

The computer's full name was the Tandy TRS-80 Model 200 Portable Computer. It was sold at RadioShack (RSH) stores. The 200 was a deluxe version of the very popular Model 100, which was a very early, remarkably compact laptop that ran on AA batteries. Both were manufactured by Kyocera (KYO) in Japan and were sold under different brand names worldwide.

The 100 (1983) was a very flat design with a small screen (8 lines of text). The Model 200 (1985) was a clamshell design with a much larger (40 characters by 16 lines) flip-up, LCD screen. Black and white, of course. The 200 measured 11.6 by 8.2 by 2 inches and weighed in at a svelte 2.9 pounds. (Compare that with Apple's (AAPL) $6,500, 15.8-pound Mac Portable from 1989.)

The 200 was a powerhouse for its day. The processor was a 2.4MHz Intel (INTC)80c85. Stock, it came with 24KB of RAM and 72 KB of ROM -- both expandable, to 72KB and 104KB respectively.

There were all sorts of available ports on the laptop, including a parallel printer, tape, bar code, phone (modem), RS232 and a system bus. There was no built-in media, but you could add on peripherals.