Day 12, Tandy 102
I am going to be spending a lot of time at the North Bay Python 2025 Conference in Petaluma over the weekend, so I'm releasing this installment of the "my garage gems" series a bit early.
Perhaps this is not exactly a "gem" per se, but it is an interesting thing nonetheless. This is a Tandy 102 portable computer which were manufactured by Kyocera for Radio Shack in the 1980s. This particular example bears a manufacture date of 1987, making it a rather late model of its type. These were powered by 4xAA batteries, and had an estimated battery life of 20 hours. They included a model (300 baud!) along with a text editor and BASIC.
I keep forgetting that I have one of these. I can't remember where or when I got it. I was somewhat sad to
discover that it appears to not be functional anymore. I put new batteries in it, flipped it on, and... nothing.
I decided to open it up and see if anything obvious like corroded battery terminals were at fault. Excuse the
rather poor photos of the inside: my workbench does not have the best lighting, and frankly I was thinking it
wasn't going to be very interesting, so I snapped a couple of handheld pictures that look a little blurry.
Disassembly is pretty straightforward, four screws hold the bottom, you can then spudge the front off, two more
screws and the motherboard lifts away. The (excellent) keyboard and the display are attached with ribbon
connectors that pull out with some friction, but don't show any signs of corrosion.
Inside nothing appears dramatically amiss. I put some contact cleaner on the battery terminals, and installed 4 fresh AAs. Using my multimeter, I verified that 6 volts were making it out of the battery pack. I didn't see any signs of corrosion. There is a small nicad battery inside that backs up the battery memory. Measuring that showed a voltage of just 137mV, which probably indicates that it's dead (not too surprising, given that it is nearly forty years old). I reached the limit of my debugging skill, so I buttoned it back up.
I think that I'll try to find it a good new home. Does anyone with slightly greater skill at reviving old hardware want to give it a go? I'll let it go for postage if you want to drop me an email.