A nice series of photos of Bill Gates, who, by the way, just stepped down from the board of Microsoft, shot in 1984, when Gates was still actively working on code.
Highlights, are a photo showing Bill Gates with a design draft of the MSX character set still under revision (readable!), and this name-the-computer image:
A propos, can you name the machines?
TRS-80 Model 100. One of the last projects Bill Gates himself coded on (that âweâ are aware of.)
I would so love something with that form factor in leu of an alphasmart.
Itâs interesting how much paper there is in some of those photos. Iâd not fully realized how far Iâd moved towards a âpaperless officeâ until I recently started doing some old-school programming (with an actual Apple IIc and paper copy of the Apple II Reference Manual), and realized how important printouts are when youâre dealing with a single 40Ă24 window into the computer. (Or even 80Ă60, if you were lucky enough to have an Ann Arbor Ambassador 60.)
Iâve been thinking along the lines for years. The main hurdles are manufacturing a case (the tooling for moulds is really expensive) and the lack of a suitable keyboard (I wouldnât know of any modern mechanism as suitable as the Alps SKFL switches used in the Kyocera portables. Details: Alps SKFL series - Deskthority wiki).
What may profit from improvements are certainly the screen (80 cols please, tilting, like the Olivetti M10 had it) and real cursor keys (like the NEC PC-8201 had it). Of course, weâd need a few extra keys for a modern system. (Because of this, it doesnât make sense to just jam some modern parts into an old shell.)
It would be my favorite machine, but I canât see it happen. (No marketing department of a capable manufacturer would come up with something even faintly related.)
There was a project for something similar a few years ago, but it didnât go anywhere. (I think, there was a prototype, but the costs of small scale manufacturing were prohibitive.)
I can only name the VT100 (white display in the corner with the box on top), the Victor 9000 (beige thing next to it), the Zenith machine which I believe is a clone of the H-89 (or vice-a-versa), next to the V9000, the Not Blue ADM-3A (bulbous white/beige thing on the floor). Pretty sure those werenât all blue.
And, of course, the Model 100 on the table with Mr. Gates.
I was pretty sure about the Victor, but not 100%.
I believe, the box left of the VT100 (or is it VT102? 
) is an Olivetti M20.
Zoomed out, I think that might actually be a VT105 displaying a box plot in its limited graphics mode. Zoomed in, it appears to be a text spreadsheet (perhaps SuperCalc on CP/M on whatever box itâs sitting on top of, or perhaps thatâs an LSI-11 and itâs some RT-11 spreadsheet?). Either way I fully concur that itâs in the VT-100 line.
The machine on top is almost certainly a Z-89. My question is, what is it sitting on? Was there an expansion frame for the Z-89 that wasnât also marketed as a Heath product, or is it a different computer entirely?
Unfortunately the linked video is gone, but hereâs the blog post, I think:
Speaking of the TRS-80 Model 100 (AKA Model T), this was part of an entire family of portable computers designed by Kyocera and tailored to specific vendors, namely the TRS-80 Model 100, Olivetti M10, NEC PC-8201A , and the Kyotronic 85 (Kyoceraâs own edition).
(The first to market was probably the NEC PC-8201, the Japan-only version without the âAâ, but with a ASCII+kana character set.)
The label on the Kyocera 85 indicates that these were actually manufactured by Kyosei Co, Ltd.
I once did a write-up on these âKyocera siblingsâ as the first installment of a blog dedicated to a Retro Challenge project (thereâs are also some details on the BASIC used and especially about low-level display programming for these machines in various episodes of this blog). I think, it is still a nice overview. However, in this first episode, I somewhat suggested that the Kyotronic 85 may be the closest to the reference design, which is probably not the case. (A look at the boards and especially into the ROM suggests that the Kytoronic 85 is more a low-spec derivative of the TRS-80 Model 100.) I still think that there must have been an initial reference design (in order to sell the concept to the various vendors), which probably also served as the prototype â and I guess that it was close to what became the TRS-80 Model 100.
So for a comprehensive overview of these machines, have a look at:
It turns out thereâs a copy of it on peertube here (for now!) but also it seems the video is Lunduke riffing on his own earlier post, which is archived here:
Lunduke has had a rather⌠distressing trend of slowly rolling his videos off of yutube ont oOdysee for the sake of monotization, with his own mastadon where youâre not allowed to post without subscribing.
Which has rather soured me on the guy.
