Vintage Computer Show 1997 Part 2 by Robert Bernardo What! Have I turned? Have I gone over to the dark side? Have the forces of light fallen to the shadows? Have I become a traitor, a turncoat, a Benedict Arnold? Have I turned my back on the Commodore universe? In October of 1997 I went to the first annual Vintage Computer Festival, a mostly 8-bit computer fair, held in Pleasanton, California. I went looking for Commodore; I found many Commodore hardware exhibits and several software vendors. After going around the vendors' tables to scan what they had for sale, I decided to start buying...a few accessory Koala programs here, a few older Amiga programs there. My friend, Larry Anderson, and his wife, Diane Hare, had set up a few tables. It had only cost them $15 for the tables, but as vendors, they didn't have to pay the $15 weekend entrance fee. I had met Larry months earlier when he helped me with a software problem. He was also the SYSOP of the Commodore bulletin board system, Silicon Realms, at 209 754-1363. As I looked through the various hardware and software goodies on Larry's table, I spied a dream computer. There it was--a Tandy 100 portable laptop computer. No, we're not talking of modern-day laptop computers with full-color screens, Pentium processors, big hard drives, and CD-ROM capability. This was a Tandy 100, a laptop sold by Radio Shack back in the early 1980's. It had almost a full-sized keyboard, and it had several programs built into ROM. It had no disk drive, but it did have a built-in modem. The entire computer ran off of 4 pen-light batteries. I remembered Radio Shack selling it for $595 or $695; in fact I should have an old RS catalog with the advertisement for the computer. Larry's Tandy 100 was missing a very important part, though. It didn't have the liquid crystal display! Yes, it would be very difficult to gauge what was going on with the computer if I didn't have the 40-character per line, 8-line screen. I asked Larry about the missing part. He wanted $50 for the Tandy but was willing to go lower. He was certain that others would have the screen, for example, Club 100, the Tandy 100 club of the San Francisco Bay Area. Larry even mentioned that another vendor may have LCD panel for sale, and he pointed me to another table across the room. It was the end of the day. He and the wife were leaving for dinner, and because the room was closing, they would leave the materials at their table for the next day. Larry trusted me; he said that I could bring the 100 to the other vendor for comparing the required part and that if I wanted to buy his machine, I could leave the money in a bag by his table. If I didn't want the computer, I would just leave the machine in the bag. Surprised at his trusting me, I walked across the room to the table of Stephen Stone of Santa Barbara. Stephen had been one of the speakers that weekend, and his specialty was CP/M. He had quite a number of CP/M computers at his table, including transportable Kay-Pro Computers (bigger than a Commodore SX-64). I asked him whether he had a LCD screen for the Tandy 100 I was carrying. He didn't have any extra ones, but he was selling complete NEC-8201 laptops. The NEC was a sister computer to the Tandy 100. They were both manufactured by Kyocera in Japan, and they differed in some details. The NEC was decorated in 3 shades of gray and beige compared to the black of the Tandy. The NEC had dedicated cursor keys and a wedge profile; the Tandy had neither. However, the Tandy had that built-in modem; the NEC had an accessory modem that plugged into the back. Though the fair was officially over for the day, Stephen let me stay, let me try out the NEC's to my heart's delight, let me pore over the instruction books, and let me ask him plenty of questions. I was sold. I bought an NEC-8201 which came with the outboard modem, greater internal memory, 2 ram expansion packs, a datasette recorder (!), and 3 instruction books. I paid $75 for everything. This NEC is not a Commodore. When the computer is powered up, the top line of the screen says "(C) Microsoft." It does have a version of BASIC, numbered 1.2, and it is rumored that this was the last BASIC that Bill Gates personally worked on. And so, why should I want it when I'm a Commodore person? This is where long-term memory comes into play. Years ago in RUN magazine I had read an article in which the author interfaced his Tandy laptop with his Commodore. The NEC/Tandy came with a text editor in ROM. Via a null modem cable and the built-in term program, the author could transfer anything from the laptop to the Commodore. I bought the NEC to be a slave to my Commodore 128! When on the road, I could pack the NEC and write my articles on it. Upon my return home, I could dump the text article to the Commodore and read the article into Zed 0.77 for more text editing or into the Write Stuff for further word processing. Another method--I could be on the road and E-mail the article to myself; then upon my return, I could read the E-mail into the Commodore. Thus I have my first PC, a 2.4 mhz. tool to serve my Commodore. I seem to look at all modern hardware from that viewpoint--how can they serve the Commodore? When I pass by the latest Pentiums, I think, "I wonder how well a Commodore emulator would run on them?" When I pass by Macintosh computers, the same question pops up--can a Commodore emulator run on them? From my travels to England in 1997, I brought back a Commodore emulator which runs on accelerated Amiga computers. I look at the newest printers...you've got it...I think about whether they are Commodore-compatible. After years of training, this way of thinking is pretty much automatic. From The Interface, newsletter of Fresno Commodore User Group, via the Commodore Information Center, http://home.att.net/~rmestel/commodore.html