TRS-80 Model 100 - Peers and Successors

Peers and Successors

The Tandy 200 was introduced in 1984 as a more capable sister product of the Model 100. The Tandy 200 had a flip-up 16 line by 40 column display, and came with 24 KB RAM which could be expanded to 72 KB (3 banks of 24 KB). It included Multiplan, a spreadsheet application. It also added DTMF tone dialing for the internal modem, where the Model 100 only supported pulse dialing.

The last new model that could be considered part of this line was the Tandy 600, introduced in October 1985. Similar to the Tandy 200, it featured a flip-up screen, but with 80 columns rather than 40. Built-in features included a 3.5" diskette drive, rechargeable batteries, and 32K of RAM expandable to 224K. The underlying software platform was Microsoft's 16-bit Hand Held Operating System (Handheld DOS or HHDOS), along with word processing, calendar, database, communication and spreadsheet software. Unlike earlier models, BASIC was an extra-cost option rather than built in.

The last refresh to the product line was the Tandy 102, introduced in 1986 as a direct replacement for the Model 100, having the same software, keyboard and screen, and a nearly identical, but thinner, form factor. Minimum memory was 24 KB RAM.

Later portables from Tandy no longer featured a ROM-based software environment, starting with the Tandy LT1400, which ran a diskette-based MS-DOS operating system.