I was talking to an old friend from my Newton user group days online the other day – he happened to catch one of my blog posts. He agreed with me that despite its drawbacks, it was an enabling technology because it allowed for mobile email – in 1992.

But, thinking about it, it caused me to dig into my closet – and find this. It’s a 1983 TRS-80 model 100 portable, which I carried around the country (and around the world) with me a couple of times. It had a built-in 300 baud modem, for which I carried both alligator clips and acoustic cups so that I could mate it to hotel phones. It ran on AA batteries, available anywhere in the civilized world, no matter what strange voltage they used there. And it allowed me to send and receive my email via BBS systems like GEnie and CompuServe in the days before the internet.

The surprising thing was this – it powered up once I put batteries in it. My notes in my favorite ROM application, ThinkTank, were still there, as was my calendar for 1985.

Now if I can only find my satin tour jacket….