PERSONAL COMPUTER HISTORY NOW HAS ITS OWN PROFESSOR

SCIENTIFIC BLOGGING - The Internet, personal computers, word processing and spreadsheets are so embedded in today's society that it's hard to remember that just 35 years ago they didn't exist. Thomas Haigh, assistant professor of information studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is among a very small number of computer experts in the world who are also historians, studying the role of technology in broader social change. These new experts are tracing how computers have changed business and society. Researching late 20th century technology has given Haigh the opportunity to talk to many pioneers who developed both computers and the software that powers them. He conducted a series of oral history interviews for the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and has written about the history of word processing and the development of databases.

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COMPUTER HISTORY MUSEUM

GUIDE TO COMPUTER HISTORY INFO

MODEL 100

SOME CALL the Tandy Radio Shack Model 100 the first laptop. Reporters loved it and some people are still using them. Many editions of the Review's predecessor, the DC Gazette, were composed in part on a Model 100 and the editor's wife wrote her 200 page master's thesis on a Model 200 which had an external disc drive that could only handle three pages per disc.

OLD COMPUTERS - The Tandy 100 was actually a computer made in Japan by Kyocera. All the ROM programs were written by Microsoft, and even a few of them were written by Bill Gates himself These programs include a text editor, a telecommunication program, which uses the built-in modem (300 baud), and a rather good version of BASIC. . . The operating system uses 3130 bytes of the 8 KB RAM. So the 8 KB models didn't sell very well. But there was also a 24 kb model. . . The CMOS CPU allows [people] to use the Tandy 100 for 20 hours with only 4 AA batteries. The model 100/102 is still considered and used as an excellent machine, mainly to type texts when you're on the move (you can transfer them to modern computers) and even to send and receive emails.

CLUB 100