In the gap between typewriters and computers there briefly existed a market for devices
like one of these. This, is a Tandy WP-2, a portable word processor. Not quite a computer,
but definitely not a typewriter. Devices like this like this have all virtually disappeared,
with only the occasional "digital typewriter" project reinventing them. But the original
devices like this one were actually quite good. And when you don't have unreal expectations
for them, they can still be nice to use. Today we’re to take a look at how you would still
use a 1989 word processor and talk about if it holds up today. And I’ll give you a hint
about that, this video's script was entirely written on this very device. Well, at least
the first draft.
But before we roll the intro, this video is part of SepTandy! Myself and many other creators
will be releasing videos featuring Tandy Radio Shack devices. If you want to check them out,
everyone participating is linked in the description. Right now it’s shaping up to be more SeptCoCo
as Mr Lurch's Thing’s, Adrian’s Digital Basement, and TheRetroChannel have taken some
looks at them and I think LGR will be as well. But Jan Beta has broken the mold and got himself
a Model 1 to get working now. And I’ll be joining him as we start to dive into the WP-2.
The WP-2 was introduced in 1989 and first appeared in the Radio Shack Catalog the next
year for the price of $349. For a device that can't do much more than store text out of
the box, that feels like a hefty price tag. But portable computers were nowhere near that
price yet. A Tandy PC compatible laptop cost $1500 or $2500 depending on the configuration!
But that's in another league. If we go back a few pages from the WP-2 we can see the closest
other Radio Shack product at the time, the Tandy Model 102 for $599. But while that was
a fully fledged computer that ran BASIC, the WP-2 actually has a better screen, the same
amount of stock memory, and even uses a nearly identical keyboard. It can also use most of
the Model 100's peripherals which we'll come back to later. So the WP-2, wasn't a bad deal
if you didn't need it for programming.
Now the example I have here was sent to me by David some time ago and I've really been
meaning to get around to fixing it to try it out. It does have a problem but we'll need
to open it up before we can see what needs to be done. The battery contacts inside have
broken free and have lost some of the plastic that retains them. I decided that the best
solution to fix this would be to bring back the super glue and baking soda repair method
I covered a while ago. Removing the keyboard to get more space makes this a fairly easy
solution and I was able to get a good amount of material built up to hold them in place.
While I had the keyboard out I figured I may as well pull it apart and give it a good cleaning
as well. I've cleaned way too many keyboards and this has just become a routine for me
now. And I also figured I'd give the whole thing a wipe down while I was at it. After
soaking the keys, laying them out to dry, and a little wipe down and they're ready to
be put back. I guess this is technically a rubber dome keyboard, but you don't usually
have to put the domes on one at a time like this. After finishing up the keyboard I went
back and checked the battery contact repairs and they were very solid. A completely successful
repair there. With that done we can stop and appreciate some of what's going on now and
I discovered this WP-2 has had its RAM maxed out with a 128k chip. There's not much else
to see though, even the EPROM that holds what little Operating System this has is an SMD
part. I went ahead and began the reassembly process and took care of one more minor issue
where one of the screw posts had broken free. A dab of super glue and pinch of baking soda
with a little pressure and time worked well to fix that. Then there was something else
that I wanted to take another look at. Like many portable devices from this era, the WP-2
has a secondary battery to keep the memory live when the main batteries fail. This device
uses a CR2430 for this, a slightly odd battery type. However, it's the same voltage as the
more common CR2032, which I would much rather use. So I decided to massage the top contact
strip to grab more tightly and padded the battery door to hold it a little tighter so
it wouldn’t move and it worked out perfectly. The device will technically work without the
backup battery, but it will constantly blink the display making it practically unusable.
Now that my unit is fresh and ready to go now we can start to take a look at some of
its features. And the first feature I should mention is that this says Tandy on it, though
it technically isn't. The firmware copyright and the main PCB both show its origin from
a Japanese company called Citizen. You may know them more as a watch manufacturer but
they dabble in consumer electronics as well. The CBM-10WP this is based on is nearly identical
aside from the grey case. Oh yeah, Citizen also went by CBM, which isn't confusing at
all for vintage computer enthusiasts. Anyway, the Citizen version of this device seems incredibly
uncommon, even on Yahoo Auctions for Japan there aren't any for sale and that web page
I showed you earlier is the only example of a picture of one of them I could find. It
seems like the Tandy model likely outsold the original. I would be curious if the Citizen
version supports external disk drives which the WP-2 does using the Tandy Portable Disk
Drive. The compatibility is hard to guess though because the origins start to get a
little messy. The TPDD is actually designed by Brother, and sold for the Model 100, which
is based on a Kyocera. So who knows what the compatible is with that.
Now let’s talk about the experience of using it. As I said at the start of the video I
completely wrote, or at the time you’re seeing this now, am writing the script on
here because I wanted the complete experience. And now that I've been using it for a while
I can easily say that it is a very competent device. The keyboard isn't much to write home
about, but it's perfectly capable and much better than some the other devices I've used
like the Brother EP-20 from around the same time. The display is very sharp and clear
and the adjustable contrast makes it easy enough to get a good view of it at almost
any reasonable angle. Navigation in the text is quick and easy with the cursor keys that
can move by character, scroll the entire display, jump to line ends, and skip words. Though
as an HJKL user, which would have been contemporary, I am annoyed that the vertical arrow keys
are reversed. Now if you move back in the text and try to add more in the middle of
a paragraph you’ll find it really slows down when shifting the existing text. Even
an average speed typist like myself can outpace this device when it needs to move the text
around. Temporarily adding a line break where you want to add text can fix that problem
though.
Above the keyboard are the labels for the many different features and functions you
can use on the WP-2. These are split between two rows that are accessed by holding one
of two function keys and pressing the key under the label. First while editing text
you have a number of common and handy features. Searching, selecting, copying, cutting, and
pasting text are all possible and work well enough with the text based interface. Though
there isn’t an undo if you make a mistake. And it should be noted that copied text is
stored as a temporary document in main memory, so you’ll need to have space for it. Now
the completely text based UI is something to keep in mind, this display cannot show
any pixel graphics, so even things like showing page margins on the status screen are just
done with text characters. In addition to the basic text editing features it also has
some more advanced word processing features. It has a built in dictionary for spell checking
with an option to add more custom words to it. And the spell checking can either be done
on a single word or searching the entire document. It can also be used as a thesaurus and recommend
synonymous words. I find both of these to be really impressive on here but they do have
their limits. For example, the spell checker didn’t recognize “fledged” when I typed
it earlier on in the script.
Now let's take a look at some other modes the WP-2 has. Files is how you manage multiple
documents and storage devices on it. Using it you can copy files between the stock memory,
the expanded RAM, an external card, a Model 100 disk drive, and cassette. This area also
shows one more annoying problems on this device. In order to do a copy you must use one of
the many hidden shortcuts that aren't labeled on the device itself. Unfortunately it also
seems like no one has scanned the original manual online, and I haven’t found one good
place for a list of all of these. An amount of trial and error along with some reading
online has led me to find a few of them though. F1+D can delete a file, F1+C can copy a file
to another storage location, and F1+N can create a new document. I'm sure there are
more, and there's at least one more I'll come back to, but I wish there were more labels
on the keys for these shortcuts.
There are four other big functions the WP-2 has, run, phone, telcom, and calendar. Phone
is just a phonebook and both it and calendar are a waste of space on this device. I’m
not even going to dignify them with sample B-Roll. Every portable device in this era
was adding those features. You could do the same thing on a Casio Databank watch. Plus,
they also add more documents to the main memory and that space comes at a premium limiting
some functions. So I don't see anyone wanting to waste space on here for those.
Run is, well, weird. Let's get back to that in a moment because we need to look at the
device a little more closely and then we can get to Telcom first, which rocks. I haven't
really mentioned it, but on the back of the WP-2 we have four connectors. External 6V
negative center power, the cassette port for storing documents on tape with a standard
cassette recorder, a printer port that we'll definitely be trying, and lastly an RS-232
serial port. Just about everything you could wish this could do with a serial port, it
can. And this is how you store files on the Model 100’s disk drives. Now I don’t have
one of those, but we can emulate one with a cool linux program that was actually last
updated… three days ago as I’m writing this, wow. Since this is just a serial port
you can use a null modem USB serial adapter and connected directly to your computer over
USB. Then once the program is compiled you run it with a source directory for the virtual
drive and you can copy files to and from the computer. For example, I can copy over this
month’s Patreon hardcopy supporters printout and try out printing it from here in a bit.
Using this we can also easily copy something over and try out Run now. For some reason,
this device has the ability to run binaries written for its Z80 processor. The only example
of this being used though that I can find to try though is a homebrew port of CamelFourth,
a forth programming language interpreter. Which is now actually about as old itself
as the WP-2 was when it was made in 2005. Time is weird. Putting Forth on here though
does make an honest computer out of it now since it can at the minimum be used a rudimentary
RPN calculator.
The drive emulator software is really cool, but definitely not the “authentic” way
to use it. But it has another trick up its sleeve because Telcom on the WP-2 can send
and receive documents directly over the serial port as raw text. This would have been better
in its time because it could be used with nearly any system available when the device
was in use. Like my 486 DOS computer which is very close to when this would have been
used. Before you send a document, you'll want to go into files and run another hidden command,
F1+A on it. This will let you convert the WP-2's custom DO filetype into a DA file which
is essentially the same as a plain text file. This does have the side effect of clearing
all the layout metadata for the document. But this makes it much more usable on a computer.
Once the document you want to send has been converted it's time for even more hidden shortcuts,
in Telcom this time. Which before using you’ll need to set up your serial settings under
system first. I’m using the ubiquitous 9600 baud 8N1 setting for it. When you are connected
to the computer you'll want to press F1+U to upload the file from Telcom. On the computer
side you'll need to have a program that can receive the file, I'm using Procomm Plus here.
Then once you have the file on your computer you can make any changes you want to it with
your editor of choice. If you want to take the file with you again on the WP-2 you can
download it by pressing F1+D in Telcom mode and sending it from the computer. It doesn’t
know when the transfer is over though so you’ll have to end the transfer with the last hidden
shortcut I’ve found, F1+S to save it.
To me, this is what really makes the WP-2 interesting. Because you can do this same
process of uploading documents on modern computers still with serial or the disk drive emulator.
This means you could take your WP-2 out somewhere for a break or distraction free work place,
and then come back and sync it up with your computer and put the files in your prefered
office software like Google Docs. This will get you the best of both worlds because as
much as it's nice to write on the WP-2, the 8 line text interface is pretty rough for
editing and even I ended up doing that on a computer for this script.
The next thing is the same thing, Telcom still rocks and we haven't fully exhausted it yet!
The file transfer function is just part of what it can do, because it's actually a full
terminal client. If you had it connected to a modem or acoustic coupler, it could even
dial out and connect to a remote system. This would let a field reporter send a story over
a pay phone to an editor or publisher from anywhere in the world, that's pretty cool.
But it can also use interactive services like a BBS, or if you're like me, you'll see this
and think linux. And it is technically possible. But even though you can just run getty on
a serial port and there is a community created custom termcap entry available, it's really
difficult to use. The console interface doesn't work very well. And unlike with the TRS-80
DT-1 I covered last year, screen really doesn't help fix this. The 8 line display is just
extremely limiting, and anything that uses curses seems to shift everything over and
line wrapping breaks completely. It gets worse though, because even though the baud rate
is set at 9600, it seems WAY slower than that and I'm not sure why. I've tried it on multiple
systems and it's always the same. It's just slow enough that it's not really usable. So
while yes technically, it can work, I wouldn't really want to use it.
Alright, lets try one last thing before we wrap this up, printing. I still need to print
out the hardcopy supporter list for this month and there's no reason I can't do it from here.
Now I have this file pre-formatted with white space so I need to make sure the layout is
correct when I print it. You can do that in the layout menu to control margins, line and
page length, and headers and footers. I need to disable margins and set line length to
80 for my file. Then I can start the print. This is a handy feature especially if you
don't also have access to a computer. But preparing a document on a computer would give
you a lot better options, so that would be the prefered way to do it if you could.
Well, that's pretty much it for the WP-2. There are a couple more little quirks to using
it, but they aren't much to worry about. Overall I really like it and I have enjoyed using
it to write this script. But that begs the ultimate question, will I do it again? I don't
have any one objection to the idea of that. But there are a lot of little things that
will probably keep me from doing it again. I wrote the whole script on battery to get
the full portable effect. But I don't like the idea of going back to needing to feed
something more AA's all the time. And then there is the memory problem that makes modding
it with a rechargeable battery not all that appealing. If both sets of batteries fail
or just lose contact for some reason, you'll lose all your work because the data is only
stored in volatile RAM. The only way to work around this is to get ahold of one of the
rare storage expansion cards that aren't tied to the main battery. Since that's not likely
to happen, using this will always have a sense of risk involved. And lastly, the display.
For a reflective screen, it's really not that bad. But you do need to have lighting the
right angle for the fixed position screen to be clear. And the angle the light is at
and proper ergonomics rarely mix. I found that typing on it with it in my lap staring
straight down was the easiest way to use it. But that's not very comfortable for long stretches
and I found myself needing to take more frequent breaks. It is meant to be “portable” so
this is mostly forgivable. But a flip up screen would have fixed a lot of this. Part of the
strain is my fault though, I would say this video script is probably on the long side
for this device. It’s also a lot for it to store. At this point when I was writing
the script I'd used 15104 characters and have 6033 left on it with only one other blank
document in memory. Now I could move the script to the RAM upgrade chip that's in it and that
would give me plenty of space. But without that I could easily see a longer document
like this completely filling memory.
But back when this was new, there weren't many better options in its price range and
under the right workflow this would have made a lot of sense. Now, it's mostly down to just
a couple of drawbacks we don’t have to deal with on modern devices. I'll probably just
stick with writing on my computers, but the WP-2 is still an attractive concept despite
its quirks.
If you enjoyed this video you should check out the other creators making videos for SepTandy,
you can find them all linked in the Description. But for now that's everything I have to say
on the WP-2. I'll have more videos like this in the future, so you may want to subscribe.
And if you want to support the channel I am on Patreon. But for now, that's it, and I'll
see you next time.