Hello and welcome back!
What I have here are two vintage word processors.
Now, what these are meant to be is sort of an upgrade from the traditional family typewriter.
But, what they really are is, they are all-in-one computers that are portable and they have
printers built into them as well.
And they were really marketed towards people who had a lot of typing to do, but they didn’t
want to use a computer, either because they didn’t have the space for a full computer
setup and a printer, or they just didn’t want to learn how to use a computer.
Now, this Panasonic unit here was made in 1992.
Now, I know this because it’s written right on the back.
This Brother unit here is a little bit older.
I’m not entirely sure on the date.
That’s one of the things we’re going to figure out here in a little bit.
Now, this one is very similar to the one that has been shown a few times on the TV series
The Goldbergs.
No, put away the word processor, I am not writing my college essay!
The main difference is the orientation of the floppy drive, but otherwise it is very
similar.
So, what I’m going to do here is I’m going to show you how these work, and then we’re
going to take them apart and find out what’s inside.
Let’s start by taking a look at the Brother WP25.
These printers are what we used to call daisy wheel.
They rotate around and impressions of the letters are pressed through an ink ribbon.
Now, it’s very unlikely that I’ll be able to demonstrate this because ink ribbons usually
dry out after a few years.
Anyway, this is how the ribbons are installed.
It has a floppy drive for storing your work.
Lifting the back you’ll find the power cable.
So, let’s go ahead and plug this in and see if it still works.
OK, let’s flip the power switch.
And it seems to come to life.
It makes some strange noise that doesn’t sound right and says the backup memory is
cleared.
I suspect the belt is broken in the floppy drive.
By the way, on the top it advertises the floppy drive as being a 240K, which is a really unusual
capacity for a 3 and a half inch drive.
However, after a moment the noise stops and everything appears to be working.
At the top it says it has about 32K free, which isn’t exactly a lot for typing a document,
and at the bottom, we see copyright dates of 1988 and over here 1985, giving us an idea
of the times this was in production.
So, I’m going to take a few minutes to type something on here just to get a feel for things.
I really like the feel of the keys and the way they click.
The screen is a monochrome amber style, but it is remarkably sharp and clear.
One thing I find annoying is the location of the backspace.
It’s not in the same space you would normally expect it to be on a modern keyboard, or to
be honest even a keyboard from the 80s.
Anyway, I’m going to try loading some paper in just to see if the mechanism works.
Loading paper in this is actually more similar to loading paper into a typewriter than it
is a printer.
In fact, this product actually has a typewriter mode where you can type directly to the paper
without using the word processor.
So, I started to type a little bit just as an experiment, and then after a moment I noticed
something miraculous happen.
I noticed that after the ribbon moved a bit, it started to actually print ink on the paper.
I was really shocked.
You’ll have to forgive my typos, because much like a real typewriter, once you screw
up there is no easy way to fix it.
So, since we have ink.
I thought, maybe I should try to print the document I typed up earlier.
So, I’ll press PRINT, and then it tells me to insert paper and press RETURN.
Let’s do it.
And there is goes.
It’s been a long time since I’ve heard the sound of a daisy wheel printer working!
This thing appears to be working flawlessly now.
Admittedly, the ink should probably be a bit darker than this, but I’m just amazed it
is printing at all.
Now, this thing also claims to have a spreadsheet, because these buttons up here do different
things depending on if you are in spreadsheet mode, or word processor mode.
But the best I can tell you have to load the spreadsheet from this floppy disk.
However, when I insert the disk, and tell it to load the directory, the drive motor
comes on and it sounds like the belt has broken, and it just gets stuck trying to read the
directory.
OK, so let’s take a look at this second unit, the Panasonic W1525.
It’s from 1992, so it is a few years newer than the last one.
This one is kind of weird because the keyboard is attached to the rear of the device.
And the power cable is down in this hole.
The keyboard plugs in on the side using an 8-pin modular jack.
So, let’s power it on and see what we get.
OK, it comes to life as well.
This one has a monochrome green screen, which is also very sharp and clear.
There is a lot of glare showing on the camera, but in person it actually looks much better.
In fact, if I turn the light off in the room, you get a little better idea.
Now, unlike the previous model, this one has a spreadsheet built right into ROM, along
with a few other utilities.
And, it’s actually pretty simple to use.
I would imagine this was used for a lot of people to do household budgets and mortgage
calculations and stuff like that.
I have to admit that the keyboard is not as comfortable to type on.
The keys are a bit spongey feeling and unfortunately, the backspace key is also in the same irritating
location.
Now, I want to take a look at the ribbon on this one.
While the design looks really similar, something seems very different about it.
Rather than looking like fabric, this has an almost glossy look to it like I’d expect
from a thermal cartridge.
And this white ribbon here, believe it or not, is a correction ribbon so you can back
up and it works kind of like white-out.
Which, seems kind of silly being this is a word processor and thus you should be able
to fix your mistakes before you print.
But anyway, here’s how the ribbon goes in, and then you just lock it in like this.
And, even though I have little hope of this one actually printing either, I’m going
to put some paper in there and we’ll try it out.
First, I’ll type out a little bit more on the screen.
Then I’ll press PRINT, and then return to confirm.
And there it goes.
And holy cow, it’s working too!
And it’s actually really dark!
So, here’s what it printed.
It looks like I may have had the margins set wrong, but you still get the idea.
Now, this text is super sharp and high contrast.
In fact, here it is compared to the Brother unit we did earlier.
Granted, I suspect that one would be darker with a new ribbon.
But, here’s where things get really interesting.
If I pull the ribbon out now and have a look at it, check this out.
You can actually see where the letters were printed.
This type of technology is called carbon transfer, and it is sort of similar to when you use
carbon copy paper.
This was used on high end printers and of course the ribbon is a single use, once it
reaches the end, you have to replace it with a new one.
OK, so what we’re going to do now is take these things apart, and see if we can figure
out what sort of computer architecture that they actually run on.
In fact, that was the main reason I wanted to make this video is I wanted to find out
what kind of secrets these things have inside of them.
The second reason that I wanted to make this video might be somewhat less obvious.
And that’s because I’ve got 3 other video projects that are currently in the works,
but for one reason or another I’m waiting on various parts to show up or whatever I
need to complete those videos.
Speaking of that, maybe somebody could help me out because one of the things that I’m
in desperate need of that I’ve just not been able to find is, I either need to buy
or borrow a Commodore PC-1.
And these just, I’ve just not been able to find one, so if you happen to have one
of those, I need that for an upcoming video on Commodore history, so shoot me an email
if you’ve got one.
I’m hoping this metal plate on the bottom will give us some access to see the motherboard.
I am not seeing any other real obvious ways to take this thing apart.
And to my amazement, I believe this is the motherboard right here.
Let me see if I can pull it out.
Yeah, sure enough.
I’ll just need to disconnect a few of these wires so that I can get a good look at it.
And here it is.
So, looking at the board, this is the CPU.
It is a Hitachi 64180, which is basically a traditional Z80 CPU with a memory management
unit and a few other goodies packed in with it.
So, this machine runs the same machine code that you would find in a CP/M machine like
the Osborne, or even the Sinclair Spectrum.
This next chip here is the 6445 CRT controller.
It is very similar to the 6845 CRT controller used in literally hundreds of different computers
of the 1980s, including the Commodore PET and pretty much every graphics card for the
IBM PC.
These two chips appear to be 64K of dynamic RAM.
Interestingly enough, there appears to be another 8K of static RAM here, which I suspect
is used as screen buffer RAM for the video chip.
Down here we have 32K of ROM.
And here is another EPROM, but I can’t tell what size.
And down here is a massive 512K worth of ROM.
I suspect this contains stuff like the spell-checker and thesaurus.
So, that means there is at least 640K of addressable memory on this board, which is quite a lot
for a Z80 based system.
Now, I can’t tell for sure what these two chips are since they are custom chips.
But, I suspect one of them is an input/output chip for controlling things like the disk
drive, keyboard, and printer.
The other is probably some glue logic.
Anyway, so now we know what everything is on here, I’ll go ahead and put this back
together.
I’m really amazed how simple it was to get to this, I figured I’d have to tear this
thing into a million pieces to get to the board.
So, that was great of Brother to make this board so easily serviceable.
OK, now it’s time to take a look at the Panasonic unit.
This design should be at least 6 or 7 years newer than the Brother unit, so it should
be interesting to see what it uses.
I see it has a similar looking metal shield on the bottom, so I’m going to cross my
fingers and hope this also reveals the motherboard.
And, it turns out it does.
And even better, I don’t even have to mess with it to get a look at it.
So, I didn’t have as much luck identifying components on this board.
This, is the CPU.
It’s a Hitachi 6303, which is actually a micro controller based on the Hitachi 6301
CPU, but also contains 24 general purpose I/O pins, along with a tiny amount of RAM,
some timers, and other stuff.
Over here is an 8K Static RAM chip.
I believe this chip is probably used in combination with the CRT controller here, which is not
one I’m familiar with, but at least I can identify it as an off the shelf CRT controller.
Now, down here is another 4K of Static RAM.
But the rest of the chips I simply cannot identify.
Obviously some of these have to be ROM chips.
But more importantly, I cannot figure out where the 64K of RAM is, that this system
is supposed to have.
So, this one is quite a bit of a mystery.
I tried looking through old catalogs to see if I could find out what these units cost,
but the closest thing I could find was this 1991 sears catalog which has a very similar
looking Brother model, although the model number is different.
Anyway, the price is 495 Dollars, but I find it interesting that it is advertised to play
Tetris as well!
That’s pretty cool.
One other thing I noticed is if you look closely at the picture, you’ll see that the floppy
disk is actually inserted backwards into the drive, which is absolutely crazy.
Typically most floppy drives will not allow you to insert the disk backwards.
Like this one, for example, this is as far as it will go.
Interestingly enough, the drive on the Brother model will let you insert the disk pretty
much all the way, so that’s kind of weird.
So, this brother unit is actually pretty cool because if one had the time to spare, it would
actually be a pretty cool hacking project.
Because, one of the things you could do, since it has a Z80 compatible processor and a lot
well-documented, off-the-shelf hardware, you could in theory remove the word processing
software ROMs and then replace it with some sort of BASIC, or even some games or something
like that.
Now granted, I doubt that the video chip supports any sort of bit-mapped graphics, but I’m
sure you could do like Commodore PET style graphics or something like that on there.
You know, I used to see machines like this in the store when I was a kid, and I used
to play with them a little bit and I was always really disappointed because I was like, “wow,
it’s like a little portable computer.
This would be so cool, you could carry this around.”
And you know, they didn’t cost nearly as much as some of the other portable computers
that had come out at the time.
But, my only disappointment was that they didn’t run BASIC.
They didn’t have a serial port, you couldn’t connect them to a modem, you couldn’t run
any other software on them.
So anyway, it would be cool if I did have the time to actually hack it to make it actually
possible even though it would be 30 years to late.
Anyway, that about wraps it up for this episode, so as always, thanks for watching!