#screwdriver

Screwdrivers

Various Objects by Living Graphics

The "Inside the Model 100" article illustrated on the cover of this issue was less general than you might think from the picture: excerpted from a book, it specifically described how the 80C85 CPU "communicated with the rest of the world" through input/output ports. There was an article that involved opening up the computer, though: the purpose of that was to modify the hardware so that nickel-cadmium batteries would recharge when the power adapter was also plugged in. (My family made that modification to our Model 100. While I did dismantle it myself not that long ago to extract the circuit board and mail it off for capacitor replacement, I have to admit that since switching to nickel-metal hydride batteries, I've been swapping in batteries recharged in a modern device instead of seeing what happens when the modification passes current through them...)