The Fabulous DEC VT100/180
I know some of you out there believe that all of us here at The Computer Guru are a bunch of speed freaks – computer speed, that is. We’re propeller-headed, power-user geeks always searching for the latest and greatest hardware and software, totally oblivious to the real needs of real people in the real world. To us, you’re thinking, anything but the most powerful, complex systems are something we frown upon.
Actually, while we admit to some measure of "technology worship," truth is we have a tender spot in our hearts – call it nostalgia – for those primitive computers on which we "cut our computing teeth." Truth be told – you may not believe this – two of the Guru’s favorite computers were not even equipped with a hard disk! And one of these machines – brace yourself – he still uses regularly, to this day!
A Unique Bird, This Robin
The Guru’s very first computer was an odd bird indeed. In fact, it may be inaccurate to call it a computer. Put it this way: it was either a very smart video terminal, or a very dumb computer.
This beast was the VT180 (Nicknamed: The "Robin"), manufactured in Phoenix, Arizona by Digital Equipment Corporation. Yes friends, this was when some computer equipment was still made in the U.S., and before Digital bailed out of its Albuquerque building off Route 25 in Albuquerque (the building is currently for lease; you can still see the faded rectangles on the sign where the seven letters of DEC’s D-I-G-I-T-A-L logo once hung proudly).
If "VT180" sounds vaguely familiar to you, it’s because you may have heard of its older brother, the VT100, in connection with video terminals or video terminal emulation software on your PC. Virtually every PC communications program (PC or Macintosh) can emulate a VT100 because at one time the VT100 was the industry-standard for terminal-to-computer/network connections. In some places, it still is.
The VT100 was (for its time) an extremely innovative, well-built, best-selling terminal. It was to the video terminal market what IBM’s PC was to the PC market, a groundbreaking, leadership product that spawned a slew of imitators, clones, and follow-on products.
Well, the VT180 "personal computer" was the VT100’s younger and (somewhat) smarter brother. Remarkably, you couldn’t really "buy" a VT180 from DEC. What you bought was a VT100 with a separate VT180 upgrade kit consisting of a mother board, some disk drives, and some software.
You ("just") opened up the VT100 and plugged in the VT180 option board, flipped some jumpers, closed her back up, hooked up the disk drives, loaded up the software, and viola! Personal computing!
Totally Transformed
After the upgrade, your VT100 video terminal was transformed into a full-fledged 8-bit CP/M computer with 64K (that’s K, friends, not MB) of RAM. For those unwilling to leave the past behind, the machine’s VT100 terminal capabilities remained intact.
So, what did you get with this machine? CP/M, for one thing -- the operating system that lost to MS-DOS in the battle for the desktop. The anecdotal story is that Gary Kildall, the President of CP/M, had scheduled a meeting with IBM to discuss the possibility of having CP/M become the operating system of choice for the new IBM PC.
Kildall, it is said, blew off the meeting and went golfing or something. Career move, Gary! Don’t bother with that MENSA application. However, the young Bill Gates was smart (and courteous) enough to show up for the meeting he had scheduled with IBM. And the rest is history…or destiny…
So you’ve got your VT180 and you’ve got your CP/M, but what applications could you run? What could you DO with this damn machine?
Well, not a whole lot. There wasn’t much "off-the-shelf," shrink-wrapped CP/M software available, and whether the stuff that was available would actually run on the Robin was anybody’s guess. It did ship with Microsoft’s Multiplan, a simple but pretty decent spreadsheet, a VisiCalc clone, a kind of "Lotus 1-2-3-" or "Excel-Lite" (okay, VERY lite). It also came with a word processor, "Select," that was so absolutely awful it pains the Guru to write about it, even after 15 years.
In Select, you couldn’t just enter text into the document. First you had to tell Select you were going to enter text, then you could enter the text. When you were done entering text, you had to TELL Select you were done. Now you could edit what you’d written – but only after you TOLD Select you wanted to edit it. When you were done editing, of course, you had to TELL Select you were done. And then you could print. But you couldn’t just print. You had to TELL…
You get the idea.
You Got What You Paid For
Of course the Robin was abysmally slow, and the software was (by today’s standards) unbelievably lame. CP/M, for example, was nothing to write home about ("Dear Mom and Dad, I’ve got CP/M, it sucks, Love, Junior"). CP/M was infamous for its "PIP" command (the equivalent to DOS COPY); why the CP/M folks didn’t name this command COPY instead is one of those eternal, insoluble mysteries.
PIP was used to copy files, but "Digital Research, Inc." (the makers of CP/M, no relation to Digital Equipment Corporation) reversed the syntax – instead of COPY FROM: TO: it was COPY TO: FROM:, which makes virtually zero-sense unless you’re dyslectic, or from some other planet, or dimension, or something. The result was, you guessed it, lots of wiped out files; people frequently overwriting new files with older ones, which is just about the very last thing in the world you want to happen with a computer!
The famous portable "Osborne" computer used CP/M, also, as did the early Apples. Maybe if CP/M hadn’t been so bad, Steve Jobs and his pals wouldn’t have been motivated to create The Apple Macintosh O/S!
Actually, the Microsoft Multiplan Spreadsheet included with the Robin wasn’t half-bad, which goes to show that even then, way back when, Microsoft built good software and knew what it was doing. You also got Microsoft BASIC with the VT180, which was a fine BASIC, nothing fancy, quite handy if you needed to do a little programming, nothing compared to the Visual Basic and C++ of today.
Built Like A Brick…Built Very Well Indeed
The Robin’s floppy disks barely held any information, and of course the monitor was monochrome with no color available. On the other hand, the machine was "Digital Solid," built with a ruggedness that is, in most cases, as extinct as the Dinosaur today. You could actually spill an entire cup of coffee onto a VT100 keyboard, and when the thing dried out it would still work! Try that with any ordinary PC Keyboard today, and good luck to you – you’ll need a replacement keyboard in most cases.
The machine also had terminal emulation built into the hardware (it was, after all, a terminal!), which means you didn’t even have to boot up the operating system (not to mention a communications program) in order to run the machine as a terminal – a DEC terminal, anyhow. It was also dead-reliable as a terminal, with no software glitches or hardware interrupt conflicts or system crashes to worry about, ever. At least, not on your end of the wire.
It’s another subject for another time, but regarding reliability, the old IBM and DEC terminals and networks were super-solid, reliable, stable computing platforms compared to the finicky Windows/MAC PCs of today. The incompatibilities and system crashes and other computing glitches experienced (and taken for granted) by today’s PC users (both individual and corporate) would never have been tolerated in yesterday’s terminal-to-mainframe environments. This is progress?
Oh, I forgot the printer – yes, the VT180 printer. I have tried to push it out of my mind over the years, but I have failed.
Not Quite Enchanting
The printer of choice for the VT180 was Digital’s "LA34," built right here in The Land of Enchantment at DEC’s Albuquerque plant! The LA34 was a big beast, very ungainly and very slow, the plastic case molded using DEC’s "VERY SEVENTIES" hideous brown and orange ("china red") colors, like you’d see in a circa 1974 office building or school cafeteria.
But it was EXTREMELY rugged and reliable. Can you say ARMY TANK? They truly don’t build products like these anymore, friends (except for certain industrial and commercial applications), and part of the Guru’s heart is grieving because of it. The other part leaps for joy.
The text output of the LA34 was really awful, very difficult to read, some might say illegible even, for one specific reason – the printer lacked the ability to reproduce what are called "descenders."
Observe that in most type you see, the bottoms of the "ys" and the "js" and the "gs" fall below the baseline of other characters such as "is" and "os" and "ns." This typographical design makes the type easy to read for certain obscure and not-fully-understood reasons that have to do with the eye and the brain – human perception.
We Don’t Do Descenders
But the LA34 simply couldn’t "do" descenders, so the printer designers created these very odd looking characters that raised the height of certain letters, and squashed the bottoms of other letters, in some really bizarre ways, so that all the letters were actually aligned on the same baseline. If it sounds kludgey (i.e., badly-engineered), it was (or, one might argue, well engineered given the budgetary and other constraints imposed upon DEC’s earnest, hard-working engineers!).
In any case, the printed output from the LA34 was maddeningly difficult to read. Eventually, smart Robin owners chucked their LA34s and bought LA100s, which could do descenders, and printed pretty quickly. Actually, smart Robin owners chucked their Robins and bought Rainbows, but that is (again) another story for another day.
Last we heard, some guy in Boston bought a bunch of Robins and programmed them (using, yes, the CP/M and MS Basic shipped with the machines!) to perform telephone call switching services for hotels – unattended. That’s right! A real-world business application for the Robin that did not require a human being having to use it!!! If that’s not pure genius, I don’t know what is. Reminds me of the James Herriot story in which the author played matchmaker to an otherwise wonderful dog who was prone to flatulence, and an elderly owner who had lost his sense of smell!
So that’s enough Technostalgia for this month. Next month, read about The Guru’s OTHER diskless wonder – the phenomenal 1987 Toshiba T1000 Laptop – in the May 1, 1996 issue of GV. Those owners of brand-new $ 8,000 IBM ThinkPads with huge color screens and foldaway keyboards are going to turn GREEN with envy when they hear about this $ 200, brain-damaged road warrior that never says die because it can’t figure out how to!
Diskless Wonders, Part Two
Earlier, I promised – nay, threatened – to write about the amazing 1988 Toshiba T1000, a laptop computer with a heart of gold, and a brain of…well, a laptop computer with a heart of gold. And seeing as The Guru always keeps his promises…
The Toshiba T1000 (list price: $ 1,199 in 1988) was (and is) a solidly-built, reliable, reasonably lightweight (6.4-pound) laptop computer with a great keyboard but not too much else to recommend it. Like last month’s featured diskless wonder, the DEC VT180 ("Robin"), the Toshiba machine also made it off the engineering drawing boards and into production (somehow) without a hard disk. While the Robin managed this trick with four (count ‘em) floppy disk drives and built-in terminal emulation firmware, the T1000 pulls it off with just a single 3.5-inch 720KB diskette drive (an external 5.25" floppy drive was a factory option) – and some technological trickery.
The first trick is that the Toshiba’s operating system, genuine Microsoft MS-DOS V2.11, is built right into the system’s firmware. That’s right: DOS on a chip. So forget upgrades and step-ups and startup floppy disks and what-have-you. This machine runs MS-DOS V2.11 straight from silicon, and will likely ALWAYS run DOS 2.11 straight from silicon, unless you want to boot a later DOS version from a floppy (SLOW), or unless somebody, somewhere hot rods the machine somehow with a custom DOS chip. It sure won’t be me.
Remember, the T1000 has a fully-functional parallel port in the back, which means you can plug in a full-size portable "backpack" hard disk from companies such as MicroSolutions. But that would change the fundamental nature of the machine – and defeat the purpose of this article. We’re talking sow’s ears here, remember, not silk purses.
Back To Grim Reality…
So, with MS-DOS V2.11 on a chip, the T1000 gives you reasonably fast boot-ups (actually, the system memory test is painfully slow, but it can be turned off in CMOS setup, or bypassed by pressing the space bar during startup), and when you’re done, you’re actually staring at a real MS-DOS C:\ prompt! Most of the familiar, basic DOS functions and utilities (copy, format, delete) are there, but forget "memmaker" or "defrag" or "scandisk" or "drivespace" or any of the newer stuff.
So how can you run any programs on this machine, equipped as it is with just one floppy drive and no hard disk? After all, you can’t "write" files to Drive C, because C: is the DOS Chip, and it’s a read-only "drive." Well, there’s a tricky little feature on the T1000 that lets you store customized copies of your "Autoexec.bat" and "Config.sys" files in a small section of base system RAM, since the standard Autoexec.bat and Config.sys" files that come on the chip are "hard-wired" and can not be modified.
You’ll never run Windows on this 80C88-equipped machine (an NEC clone of the ancient Intel 8088 chip, both chips have a 4.77 MHz clock speed), but Toshiba thoughtfully provided its customers with SOME solutions to this potential "software, what software?" dilemma. There is a single 720KB 3.5" floppy diskette drive on the T1000 which can work as Drive "A" or Drive "B" or both. Thus, with some judicious disk swapping, you can actually stuff some programs into the system’s 640KB of main memory. Remember, this sucker will run early DOS versions of Lotus 1-2-3, but the performance would make true power users weep in their sleep.
The REAL trick to making the Toshiba T1000 a useful machine is the factory-supplied Toshiba "Internal 768KB Memory Expansion Board," an add-on option that provides the Toshiba T1000 with a full .768 Megabytes of "electronic hard disk storage" (otherwise known as "hard RAM"). This little option card is the key to making the Toshiba a workhorse (would you believe, pony?); it is hard to imagine a T1000 serving as anything but a high-tech paperweight without one.
With the expansion board installed and configured as "Drive D," the Toshiba actually has the equivalent of a perfectly usable (if tiny) "hard disk." And because this "disk" storage is in firmware (no moving parts or motors, like an ordinary hard disk), it is very fast and very reliable (i.e., impervious to dust, vibration, shock, drive spindle bearing failures, et al.).
The (Little) Laptop That (Almost) Could
Of course, this is all very comical, isn’t it – with today’s typical hard disks on desktop machines running from 850MB to 2.0 GB and beyond, a .768 MB (that’s .000768 Gigs!) "hard disk," electronic or otherwise, is a joke, right? Well, almost but not quite. With judicious file selection and trimming, you can actually fit some useful software on this beast: like, for example, the core components of Microsoft Works Version 2.0 for DOS (core means the basic program files, but no help files or fancy international options or accessories or what-have-you).
Now remember, even this early version of MS Works provides a word processor, a spreadsheet, a database, an address book, and a communications package, and since they’re Microsoft programs, they work more or less as advertised, which is to say, pretty well. I also have a Microsoft Mouse driver (V 9.0) installed, and "Laplink 3.0" for DOS (a very useful yet compact file transfer package), and a few word processing files scattered about the "disk" here and there. All this, and there’s STILL approximately 30K of free space left on that 768KB Hard (RAM) Disk!
A Miracle Machine
So now, is this a well-equipped laptop, or what? You be the judge. You can write letters on it, save them to the "hard drive" (and/or a floppy diskette), and when you get home, pop the floppy out of the laptop into a desktop machine, and (after a simple file translation) suck those files up into a "real" word processor like Microsoft Word 7.0 for Windows 95. Same goes for the spreadsheet – seamless data translations. If it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck…it must be a duck.
With the amazing Toshiba T1000, you can process words, crunch numbers, track names and addresses, even dial up remote computers with the built-in 1200 baud modem! In fact, you can act like Thurber’s Walter Mitty and pretend the T1000 is actually an $ 8,500 IBM ThinkPad with Windows 95 and Microsoft Office installed!
One Man’s Garbage, Another Man’s Treasure
So in some ways the Toshiba T1000 is pretty lame, but in other ways, considering how much you can squeeze into it, it’s remarkable. Like I said earlier, the keyboard is excellent – perhaps its very best feature. The battery life is pretty good too (roughly five hours per charge) because there’s no hard disk or fancy screen to soak up all the juice.
Speaking of battery life, you have to watch the battery like a hawk, because if it goes TOTALLY dead you lose everything on the hard RAM disk – the program and data files just vanish into the ether, never to be heard from again. So it’s best to keep a backup floppy close at hand, with all the stuff from Drive D: on it, so you can restore the contents of the Hard Ram Drive if and when you have to. Hey, now there’s an innovation – a "hard disk" you can back up with a single floppy!
This machine’s Achilles’ Heel (some uncharitable folks might say the entire MACHINE is an Achilles Heel) may not even be the lack of a hard disk, so much as the rather mediocre LCD screen. It’s a greenish-bluish kind of muddy-looking half-height LCD affair, with a rather odd "aspect ratio." That is, the screen is plenty long enough (even too long), but not tall enough. Not that you could ever find a graphics program that would run on this beast, but if you could, the graphics would look oddly squashed!
As regards general screen visibility, the screen is at its best in very bright but indirect sunlight, not so great in direct sunlight, awful in low-light, and unusable in the dark. And even under the best of conditions, the screen can be somewhat difficult to read because (like the DEC LA34 printer mentioned in last month’s Guru Views), the Toshiba T1000 screen can not reproduce typographical "descenders."
But all in all, the Toshiba T1000 really isn’t that bad – like a sweet pound dog, it’s hard to really dislike, because, well, it TRIES. The Guru picked up his copy for just $ 200, overpaying a little perhaps, but it has served him well as a poor man’s road warrior. Only real computer snobs (like The Guru himself) know how primitive and limited the machine really is; to most observers, it’s plenty high-tech (looks are everything, and to the untrained eye, the T1000 looks just like a "real" laptop computer).
Like a mediocre mate, as long as you don’t expect too much from it, The Toshiba T1000 will never really stir you up, but never really let you down, either. By the way, I suspect the T1000 would be a much-less usable machine were it not for the very satisfactory way that Microsoft Works V2.0 software happens to fit on it and run on it. I tried Works 3.0 and it was WAY too big to run on the T1000!
Here is a very rare example of when older, less capable software can actually fill a computing need better than the newer stuff. It’s also an example of one of the very few times I actually lucked out here in Santa Fe because the only software readily available in town (from "Santa Fe Computer Works" on Second Street; this was in the pre-Office Depot days) was this older version of Works, which was outdated and generally useless for most purposes, but still being sold by SFCW off-the-shelf at full price!