[geeks] advice sought: what to do with Tandy 1100FD laptop?

[Robert Toegel]

Well, you could always give it to someone who wants to program older
Motorola walkie talkies.  Their program (to program the older ones) only
runs in dos.  Just a suggestion.  Actually, deskmate was one of the first
attempts at making a "do everything" program for people who were not very
computer literate.

Bob

On Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 21:50 Patrick Giagnocavo <patrick at zill.net> wrote:

> So a friend gave me this laptop. It has MSDOS v3.3 plus the (laughable)
> Tandy DeskMate application suite in ROM. An NEC V20 CPU, which was an Intel
> clone, runs it.
>
> The floppy needs a rebuild - no problem as I have the pinouts to make the
> cable to use a newer 1.44 in its place (but it will still use only 720K
> floppies due to ROM).
>
> Should I gut it, keep the CGA text screen (still crisp and easy on the
> eyes), and stick a BeagleBoard or Raspberry Pi inside, and buy or fabricate
> a way to drive the screen?
>
> Should I just restore it to its original condition, except build a larger
> battery pack to replace the old one (the claim was that it would run for 5
> hours on the original batter, thus maybe I can make it run 10 hours)?
>
> What does the list suggest?
>
> Any truly oddball ideas you have?  What would you do with it?
>
> (didn't send to rescue@ since it is not Sun, and not Unix).
>
> Cheers
>
> Patrick
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