#tandy 200

While this issue's feature article introduced "the interactive publication" via comments about the interactivity of computer games (and then asked you to turn to further back in the magazine), the program itself appeared to be more of a bulletin board system with "telephone answering machine" elements. It was also something of a work in progress. Another article talked about how to get the Model 100's modem dialing through a "cordless phone," closing by wondering about a "connection through a cellular radio unit."

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After attending a casual announcement of the Tandy 102 at the Tandy Computer Business Users Group annual get-together ("in the midst of a predominantly Tandy 6000/Xenix audience"), the people at Portable 100 decided to pare their magazine's name back to its original length "in honor of Tandy's torchbearer." This issue (which included a hardware hacking project to add a power light to the Tandy Portable Disk Drive and suggestions on how to use a standard outliner for genealogy research), though, will be the last one to show up for some time...

Three existing programs (an outliner, a database, and a text formatter) compressed into one 32K ROM chip provided the cover story for this issue. The "Do-It-Yourself Tip" for a null modem involved hacking your own hardware to add an extra switch to your portable rather than carry two serial cables. One piece inside that didn't get on the cover reviewed an eighty character by twenty-five line LCD screen that interfaced with the Model 100 in much the same way the much less portable Disk/Video Interface did; the review was just a little mixed about the system having some chance of wiping out all your files in RAM.

While the "New Products" column in this issue led off with "Guess we'll have to wait a little longer for the release of the TRS-80 MODEL 200," the Tandy 200 did receive extensive coverage in an article you had to turn to another part of the magazine twice to conclude. That coverage's conclusion supposed that Tandy's new portable wasn't "the revolutionary item" the Model 100 had been, but still offered improvements over its predecessor.

Cover aside, the contents of this issue were eclectic. Bill Barden's article on "creating business forms" approached the "heresy" of wishing MS-DOS machines were a little more like the Macintosh in representing on their screens what output from their printers. An article on "predicting solar outages" explained how satellite dish users would have their TV reception degrade or even disappear twice a year when the sun wound up in line with the geostationary communications satellite their dish was pointed at. "Programmer roulette" was a program for the Model 100 that posed the potential risk of killing a perhaps-misbehaving file, although you could default to a dummy file if you didn't want to risk anything. A "MicroScopes" news section reported on IBM introducing Personal System/2 computers, OS-9 showing up at last for the Color Computer 3, an improved Portable Disk Drive from Tandy, and Microsoft changing its logo, where we learned some employees now regretted the disappearance of a distinctive "O" in the middle of the old logo they called the "Blibbit."

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