Gadgetory

this is one of the first laptops or maybe it's one of the first tablets I don't know what you want to call it I'm Walt Mossberg I have been reviewing tech gadgets since the early 90s and collecting them since the 80s and I wanted to show you some of my collection it's the trs-80 model 100 which is made by RadioShack and this was my personal one you can see I still have my little name label here it used for double A's it's what it used according to the label here I used it at the Wall Street Journal to cover things because it was one of the first computers that had a built-in modem it's a word processor phone directory and dialer it even communicates with the office computer Roger alpha treborj I think it cost about twelve or thirteen hundred bucks for each one of these at one time I remember them saying publicly that their biggest customer base was journalists the media computer network is the most efficient way to inform all the news media in only a few minutes time the journal had a lot of money rolling in dough in those days print was big so they gave me the budget to buy one of these for everyone in the bureau you could send your story to the journal and then what was on the other end was a printer that had a modem built into it and it would print it out because the editing process was still paper you'll go far I think this is I mean I honestly think you could probably draw a line from this to the iPad of all things because look it's a single flat surface it's not a clamshell I've granted it has a tiny black and white screen nothing like a retina iPad screen but I think this in a way Radio Shack at the time was kind of a power and computing him and then they went out of the business but maybe they would have had the purse you know tablet everyone wanted to have at some point