Brother WP25 and Panasonic W1525

Hello and welcome back!

What I even have here are two vintage word processors. Now, what these are meant to be is kind of an upgrade from the normal family typewriter. But, what they really are is, they're all-in-one computers that are portable and that they have

printers built into them also. And that they were really marketed towards people that had tons of typing to try to, but they didn't want to use a computer, either because they didn't have the space for a full computer setup and Now, this Panasonic unit here was made in 1992. Now, I do know this because it's written right the rear. 

This Brother unit here may be I'm not entirely sure on the date. That's during all one in every of one among the items we're getting to find out here in a bit. Now, this one is extremely almost like the one that has been shown a couple of times on the TV series The Goldberg's. No, put away the word processing system, I’m not writing my college essay!

The main difference is that the orientation of the floppy drive, but otherwise it's very similar. So, what I'm getting to do here is I'm getting to show you ways these work, then we're getting to take them apart and Let's start by taking a glance at the Brother WP25. These printers are what we won’t to call daisy print wheel. They rotate around and impressions of the letters are pressed through an ink ribbon. Now, it's impossible that I'll Anyway, this is often how the ribbons are installed. It's a floppy drive for storing your work. Lifting the rear you'll find the facility cable. So, let's plow ahead and plug this in and see if it still works.

OK, let's flip the facility switch. And it seems to return to life. It makes some strange noise that doesn't sound correct and says the backup memory is cleared. I think the belt is broken the floppy drive. By the way, on the highest it advertises the floppy drive as being a 240K, which may be a special capacity for a 3 and a half inch drive.

However, after a flash the noise stops and everything appears to be working. At the highest it says it's about 32K free, which isn't exactly tons for typing a document, and at rock bottom, we see copyright dates of 1988 and up here 1985, giving us a thought of the days this was in production. So, I'm getting to take a couple of minutes to type something on here just to urge a pity things. I actually just like the feel of the keys and therefore the way they click. 

The screen may be a monochrome amber style, but it's remarkably sharp and clear. One thing I find annoying is that the location of the backspace. It's not within the same space you'd normally expect it to get on a contemporary Anyway, I'm getting to try loading some paper in only to ascertain if the mechanism works. Loading paper during this is really more almost like loading paper into a typewriter than it's a printer.

In fact, this product actually features a typewriter mode where you'll type on to the paper without using the word processing system. So, I began to A bit even as an experiment, then after a flash I noticed something miraculous happen. I noticed that after the ribbon moved a touch, it began to actually print ink on the paper. I used to be really shocked. You'll need to forgive my typos, because very similar to a true typewriter, once you screw up there's no easy thanks to fix it.

So, since we've ink. I thought, maybe I should attempt to print the document I typed up earlier. So, I'll press PRINT, then it tells me to insert paper and press RETURN. Let's roll in the hay. And There's goes. It's been an extended time since I've heard the sound of a daisy print wheel printer working!

This thing appears to be working flawlessly now. Admittedly, the ink should probably be a touch darker than this, but I'm just amazed it's printing in the least. Now, this thing also claims to possess a spreadsheet, because these buttons over here but the simplest I can tell you've got to load the spreadsheet from this diskette.

However, once I insert the disk, and tell it to load the directory, the drive motor comes on and it seems like the belt has broken, and it just gets stuck trying to read the directory.

OK, so let's take a glance at this second unit, the Panasonic W1525. It's from 1992, so it's a couple of years newer than the last one. This one is quite weird because the keyboard is attached to the rear of the device. Therefore the power line is down during 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 involves life also. This one features a chromato green screen, which is additionally very sharp and clear. There's tons of glare showing on the camera, but face to face it actually looks far better. In fact, if I turn the sunshine off within the room, you get a touch better idea. Now, unlike the previous model, this one features a spreadsheet built right into ROM, alongside a couple of other utilities. And, it's actually pretty simple to use. I might imagine this I even have to admit that the keyboard isn't as comfortable to type on. The keys are a touch spongy feeling and unfortunately, the back spacer is Additional within the same irritating location. Now, I would like to require a glance at the ribbon on this one.

While the planning looks really similar, something seems very different about it. Instead of looking like fabric, this has an almost glossy look transverse like I'd expect from a thermal cartridge. And this white ribbon here, believe it or not, is correction ribbon so you'll copy and it works quite like white-out. Which, seems quite silly being this is often a word processing system and thus you ought to be ready to fix your mistakes before you print? But anyway, here's how the ribbon And, albeit I even have little hope of this one actually printing either, I'm getting to put some paper in there and we'll try it out. First, I'll Then I'll press PRINT, then return to verify.

And there it goes.

And holy cow, it’s working too!

And it’s actually really dark!

So, here's what it printed. It's like I’ll have had the margins set wrong, but you continue to get the thought. Now, this text is super sharp and high contrast. In fact, here it's compared to the Brother unit we did Earlier. Granted, I think that one would be darker with a replacement ribbon. But, here's where things get really interesting. If I pull the ribbon out now and have a glance at it, check this out. You'll actually see where the letters were printed. 

This sort of technology is named carbon transfer, and it's kind of almost like once you use carbon paper. This was used on high end printers and in fact the ribbon may be a single use, once it reaches the top, you 've got to exchange it with a replacement one.

OK, so what we're getting to do now's take this stuff apart, and see if we will find out what kind of computer architecture that they really run on. In fact, that was the most reason I wanted to form this video is I wanted to seek out. What quite secrets this stuff have inside them. The second reason that I wanted to form this video could be somewhat less obvious.

And that's because I've got 3 other video projects that are currently within the works, except for one reason or another I'm waiting on various parts to point out up or whatever I want to finish those videos. Speaking of that, maybe somebody could help me out because one among the items that I'm in desperate need of that I've just not been ready to find is, I either got to buy or borrow a Commodore PC-1. And these just, I've just not been ready to find one, so if you happen to possess one among those, I want 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 rock bottom I'm not seeing the other real obvious ways to require this thing apart. And to my amazement, I think this is often the motherboard right here.

Let me see if I can pull it out. Yeah, surely. I'll just got to disconnect a couple of those wires in order that I can get an honest check out it. And here it's. So, watching the board, this It's a Hitachi 64180, which is essentially a standard Z80 CPU with a memory management unit and a couple of other goodies packed in with it. So, this machine runs an equivalent machine language that you simply would find during a CP / M machine just like the Osborne, or maybe the Sinclair Spectrum. This next chip here is that the 6445 CRT controller. It's very almost like the 6845 CRT controller utilized in literally many different computers of the 1980s, including the Commodore PET and just about every graphics card for the IBM PC. 

These two chips appear to be 64K of dynamic RAM. Curiously enough, there appears to be another 8K of static RAM here, which I think is employed as screen buffer RAM for the video chip. Down here we've 32K of ROM. And here is another EPROM, but I can’t tell what size.

And down here may be a massive 512K worth of ROM. I think this contains stuff just like the spell-checker and thesaurus. So, meaning there's a minimum of 640K of addressable memory on this board, which is sort of tons for a Z80 based system.

Now, I can't tell needless to say what these two chips are since they're custom chips. But, i think one among them is an input / output chip for controlling things just like the disc drive, keyboard, and printer. opposite is perhaps some glue logic.

Anyway, so now we all know what everything is on here, I'll plow ahead and put this back together. I'm really amazed how simple it had been to urge to the present, I figured I'd need to tear this thing into 1,000,000 pieces to urge to the board. So, that was great of Brother to form this board so easily serviceable.

OK, now it's time to require a glance at the Panasonic unit. This design should be a minimum of 6 or 7 years newer than the Brother unit, so it should be interesting to ascertain what it uses. I see it's an identical looking metal shield on rock bottom, so I'm getting to cross my fingers and hope this also reveals the motherboard. And, it seems it does.

And even better, I don't even need to mess with it to urge a glance at it. So, I didn't have the maximum amount luck identifying components on this board. This, is that the CPU. It's a Hitachi 6303, which is really a micro controller supported the Hitachi 6301

CPU, but also contains 24 general purpose I / O pins, alongside a small amount of RAM, some timers, and other stuff. Up here is an 8K Static RAM chip. I think this chip is perhaps utilized in combination with the CRT controller Here, which isn't one I'm conversant in, but a minimum of I can identify it as an off the shelf CRT controller. Now, down here is another 4K of Static RAM. But the remainder of the chips I simply cannot identify But more importantly, I cannot find out where the 64K of RAM is, that this technique is meant to possess. So, this one is sort of a touch of a mystery. I attempted rummaging through old catalogs to ascertain if I could determine what these units cost, but the closest thing I could find was this 1991 sears catalog which features a very similar looking Brother model, although the model number is different.

Anyway, the worth is 495 Dollars, but I find it interesting that it's advertised to play Tetris as well!

That's pretty cool. One other thing I noticed is that if you look closely at the image, you'll see that the diskette is really inserted backwards into the drive, which is completely crazy. Typically most floppy drives won't allow you to insert the disk backwards. Like this one, for instance, this is often as far because it will go. Curiously enough, the drive on the Brother model will allow you to insert the disk just about all the way, so that's quite weird. So, 

This brother unit is really pretty cool because if one had the time to spare, it might actually be a reasonably cool hacking project. Because, one among the items you'll do, since it's a Z80 compatible processor and tons well-documented, off -the-shelf hardware, you'll in theory remove the data processing software ROMs then replace it with some kind of BASIC, or maybe some games or something like that. Now granted, I doubt that the video chip supports any kind of bit- mapped graphics, but I'm sure you'll do like Commodore PET style graphics or something like that on there.

You know, I won’t to see machines like this within the store once I was a child, and that I wont to play with them a touch bit and that I was always really disappointed because I used to be like, “wow, it's sort of a little personal computer. This is able to be so cool, you'll carry this around. ”And you recognize, they didn't cost nearly the maximum amount as a number of the opposite portable computers that had begun at the time. But So anyway, it might be cool if, my only disappointment was that they didn't run BASIC. They didn't have an interface, you couldn't connect them to a modem, you couldn't run the other software on them. I did have the time to truly hack it to form it actually possible albeit it might be 30 years too late.

Anyway, that about wraps it up for this episode, so as always, thanks for watching!

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