Remembering Radio Shack’s 1983 Training Film For the TRS-80 Model 100

Fast Company’s technology editor Harry McCracken is also Slashdot reader #1,641,347. He contacted us Thursday with a story about Radio Shack’s Model 100 — and a rare training film from 36 years ago: Radio Shack’s Model 100 wasn’t the first laptop — but it was the first popular one, and an innovative machine on multiple fronts. It was also the last computer to ship with Microsoft software personally coded by Bill Gates. I recently came across an internal training film intended to help Radio Shack staffers explain the Model 100’s benefits to potential customers. I’ve shared it — and some thoughts on the system’s importance — over at Fast Company. The article calls it “an even more important computer than it generally gets credit for,” noting portable computers at the time weighed a whopping 24 pounds — and required a wall outlet to run. So a four-pound PC that ran off batteries and could fit in a briefcase “introduced people to mind-bending ideas such as using a PC on an airplane” — even if it only had 8K of memory.