There is still a market for them, and they go for about $40 on ebay. They have a great keyboard and run for weeks on batteries. I have a policy of giving them to children for their tenth birthday, along with a book on BASIC programming.
The Trash-80 wasn't a laptop! They were popular though, I had one. My first memories of laptops were from Compaq, and they were not flat but more brick like, with fold down keyboards and big slots for the floppy drives. I carried one of these around for a few years (consulting), eventually it was replaced with a toshiba T1000 and its offspring.
The "Trash-80" (TRS-80 Model I) was not a laptop, but the Radio Shack Model 100 most certainly qualified. It was a brick -- no clamshell -- with a full-travel QWERTY keyboard on the bottom and a rinky-dink nonbacklit calculator display on top. It came with BASIC and some other rudimentary applications. The OS was menu-driven, and was the last significant piece of software that Bill Gates personally contributed to.
