The Weird Typewriter-Computer Hybrid

 The jacket is back because....

Uh, so, say it’s the 1980s --late 1980s or early 1990s, and you’ve always wanted to be able to write your letters as a document, save them to a floppy disk to edit later, but you’ve never been able to afford one of these newfangled personal computers. Well, Smith Corona has got you covered with this:

This bad boy is the Smith Corona PWP-3200. It is a typewriter that has a VERY large LCD display and most importantly, a floppy disk drive. Let’s take a look at it.

Alright so let’s get into it. Obviously this was a Goodwill find, as you can see by the sticker, I’ve had this for a number of years and you’ll see a great example of that in just a moment. So really, all this is a daisy wheel printer (and well look a bit more at that in a bit) but it’s a daisy wheel printer which has been integrated into a typewriter chassis with a floppy disk drive and a very basic computer. And, well first let’s turn it on. Most typewriters don’t turn on like this.

Alright, so now were in. So immediately, what you get is you get this word processing display. You’ll notice that there’s a switch here that says type and word processing (WP), were on word processing now so when I type stuff, which is gonna be hard to do with where you are as the camera, you’ll see it appears on the screen, the typewriter is not actually typing anything. Now the beautiful thing about this, is that you can write documents on the screen before you even print it, and it warns you if you’ve made a typo. It doesn’t think typo is a word, so once you hit the space bar it beeps at you to tell you, you may want to rethink that.

Uh, also this is unique to Smith Corona apparently, these functions Word Eraser, there’s a Registered Trademark thing on there so I’m guessing its some special feature. And if you hit Code and hit the same key, it will erase the entire line. But what were really here for is the word processing function. So, on the right-hand side is a floppy disk drive. 

Now I’m using what used to be Microsoft Works because the floppy drive on here can only read 800kb formatted floppies, so any disk that has been formatted as a high density disk it can’t read, because the read/write head is not strong enough to overwrite the high density disk. So if you have an unformatted high density disk it can use it, but if it’s ever been

formatted it won’t work.

So this was one of very few 800kb non-high density disks I had, and I am not in need of Microsoft Works for the Apple Macintosh, so I went ahead and used this. So with it in the floppy drive, to get to what’s on the disk--all of these little menu items here, you can see they have an underscored letter. To access them you hit select and hit that letter. So were gonna go to the disk menu, which is select-D. And, weirdly, you hear it access the floppy but it hasn’t actually done anything yet. 

You actually have to select Save, Recall, Erase, Rename, Join, Directory, or Other. So were gonna hit recall. And now it brings up a directory of what is on the disk to be recalled. So...just so that way you can see how much of a dork I am, I’m gonna pull up this file. But first it’s gonna warn me we have text in memory, do we want to keep it or not?

This was a homework assignment. When I was in my senior year of high school--I believe that was the year I got this--I’m such a dork that I did some of my homework assignments on this machine. So, if you want to just read this...this is just so incredibly, ugh. It’s not great. But, it shows you the power of a machine like this. 

Now, sadly, and I bet a lot of people who bought these machines were very disappointed in this, the actual computer--I’ve no idea what system this is--but it is incredibly slow. If you want to just scroll through this, it has to re-draw line by line. And it is not fast. If you hit Code and the down arrow it will redraw the entire screen but even that—this is not fast at all. This is very, very slow.

So yeah, it’s useful in that you can review an entire document before you print it.

But this is not at all what I’d consider to be.... ideal. Of any sort. Want to take a look at my writing when I was in high school?

There we go. So how does it actually type stuff?

Or print stuff, I should say. Well first, I’m actually going to reboot it here, so I’m gonna shut it off. Cause I want to show you what’s underneath. So this here is the daisy wheel, this is how it’s actually typing. Each one of these little fins has an engraving on it that it uses to punch onto the actual writing surface. This is sort of similar to the IBM Electric golf ball type thing, but nowhere near as, um, well honestly nowhere near as interesting. And also, these are plastic and I’m always a little curious on how long these actually last.

You can see there’s a registration point here. And the idea with using the daisy wheels is that you can change the typeface or the font of what exactly its typing. So the daisy wheel just rests in here, and then it will automatically catch.

And this here is the ribbon that it uses to type with. I do not have correction tape for this machine, so... it’s just what it is. Sadly it won’t let you print anything with the cover open so I’ll have to close it, well get a better angle for you. Just like any typewriter you load it up with paper before you begin. It’s got markings here for what various different paper sizes. The unlabeled one which continues through here is gonna be your standard letter paper So, with this machine, if we switch to typewriter mode, which I’ve just moved the switch into, now it will go as you type.

So if I start typing words I can’t spell typing so it beeped at me. You can see...hopefully...that those words are appearing on the page. I don’t have any correction tape in here, otherwise I could go and actually correct it back. If I hit Word  it will attempt to erase it. But there’s no actual correction tape in there so it’s not doing anything. But the thing is, let me move this up a little bit. We’re gonna go back into word processing mode. 

And I will call up that homework assignment. So this option here is to print. So if we select to print the document, it gives you the option to setup which I believe changes the margins and stuff like that but were just gonna go with the standard and hit Print, and it will fire away. I lied. First it’s gonna ask us if we want to print the entire document or multiple copies. So we can do, it’s giving me little---it’s pretty self-explanatory so were just gonna hit return.

OK, so I hit delete to stop the print. But as you can see, it can print (type) faster than anyone could actually type, though honestly not a lot faster. So, of course it’s doing it with 100% accuracy, but if you use this thing for printing out an 8 or 9 page letter, that process is gonna be a few minutes. And it’s probably, uh, I would not be surprised if this takes well over two minutes to print one page. Which isn’t exactly fast. So well get a little bit closer here. 

Oh my goodness. My goodness. Oh I hit caps lock. See, if I had done that on a regular typewriter now we would be deep into the woods. But let’s just go ahead and show you...remember how I was saying that this is slow?

Oh my goodness its very slow. Say I want to erase IF YOU WANT TO BE SURE T.

So in order to do that I could press and hold Backspace or I could hit the Word Eraser  key, let’s see that would be onetwothreefour five six, seven times. I’m gonna hit it seven times and watch how long it takes it to actually process that.

Still going. Yeah that’s not exactly what I’d call fast. I don’t know about you but, uh, that seems really painful, actually. But to continue with this little demonstration, if we select Disk. And it just wants you to give it a name. And I still have--Oh!

That’s an interesting point. Well get back to that in a second. I’m just gonna call it NAMEHJ. And now its saved, so if you back to the disk menu, we can recall something. Well recall Palindrome. Gonna dismiss what’s in memory because we saved it to the disk. I really don’t know what this document is, but now we can go back to what we were working on. 

We’ll have to scroll down to get to it, though. Again, well erase what’s in memory. And now, there were back to what we were doing. Now obviously if you had an actual computer this would be a lot easier. And faster. But if you had a limited budget, these were being sold up until at the very latest—or the very earliest 1993. I saw a listing for these for sale and they were less than $300.

So if you were on a tight budget and you wanted to be able to have many of the features of a word processor but didn’t have your own computer, something like this might actually be a pretty good idea. What I wanted to go back to was, if you saw when I was saving the file name, it was inserting special characters even though I was just touching numbers. 

Now, that’s because this emulates the way the caps lock key works on older typewriters. A couple odd things about the keyboard you may notice are that comma has got two commas on there, rather than having a special character and the comma like you’d expect today, it’s got two commas. Just as this is two periods. That’s because on older typewriters it wasn’t caps lock it was SHIFT lock.

And that’s why this key the default is simply lock and caps lock is an option. So if I hit lock, and unfortunately the light in the key does not work, you’ll see that I type--oh, apparently I haven’t actually turned it on, there we go--as I type its all capital letters, but the period and comma stay period and comma because there’s two of them. But any time I hit a number, I’m gonna get a special character because I don’t have caps lock on I have SHIFT lock on. 

So now every key is shifted. That’s because in the days of manual typewriters like this, when you hit shift the entire carriage is lowered. That’s actually why it’s called the shift key because it shifts the carriage down. And you can see when you get close up that the capital letters are all on the...well, let’s see I should actually look before I do a close-up...OK.

So the capital letters are all at the top of each of these strikers which means that when its shifted down the top is what hits the paper, and when it’s not shifted the bottom is what hits the paper. And because the platen is curved, even when you’re, uh, the top will miss the paper because its farther away from it. holds the carriage in the down position. So if you were to type anything, it would always be the top of the row because you’re going to have shift lock engaged. The typewriter, because this is mechanical, it can’t decide to only print numbers as numbers, And yes,  keys were on typewriters like this.