I just received an old Brother WP-3410 word processor.  Interesting little machine.  Basically a computerized typewriter, with a floppy disk drive and a CRT monitor.  I remember seeing these when I was growing up, but they seem to have faded into obscurity.  Consumer word processors started to appear in the mid-80s, and were popular thru the late-90. The range of features varied.  The most stripped down ones were just electronic typewriters.  Basic word processors had a small LCD screen, could preform spell and grammar checking on a line or paragraph of text, than type it out on paper.  More advanced models had floppy disk storage, large (usually external) monitors, and could format an entire document before printing it out using it's internal printer.  They could also preform other tasks, such as spreadsheets, mail merge, and even some games, either from ROM or as add-ons from a floppy disk.

The earliest Brother WP-series word processors somewhat resembled a Compaq Portable PC having a small screen and floppy drives in the front face, the printing mechanism behind them in the top of the main unit, and an external keyboard that doubled as a cover for the display and floppy drive.  Later models integrated integrated the keyboard into the main unit, and used an external monochrome monitor.  The floppy disks were an unusual format that could only be read or written using a Brother WP.  At the time they came out, unique disk formats were't much of a problem, as other electronic word processors had their own disk formats, along with varying disk formats for the IBM PC, Apple II, Macintosh, Amiga, Atari ST, among others.  Later models would use standard PC double density and high density floppy formats, saving documents in it's own file type, plane text (with no formatting), or sometimes the ability to export to other common file types, such as WordPerfect.  They would also transition to color monitors, more in-ROM apps, and replace the daisy wheel text printing mechanism with a quiet inkjet mechanism that was capable to WYSIWYG document creation.  Some of the latest models used MS-DOS and GeoWorks in ROM, included a modem and (using it's locked in ISP, Earthlink) do simple web browsing and email.

As I said earlier, the one I got was a WP-3410.  It uses their older (or later, economy model) architecture.  The main unit looks like an electronic typewriter, with a keyboard, and daisy wheel printing mechanism.  Below the keyboard on the front edge is a 3.5" single sided floppy disk drive that reads and writes double density disks in their unique 240 KB format.  There is a clear plastic cover over the printing mechanism.  In the back is a compartment to store the power cord, which flips up to be a paper support.   There is a key on the keyboard that toggles between TW (typewriter) and WP (word processor) mode.  In TW mode, the keyboard outputs directly to paper.  In WP mode, it outputs to the screen, allowing editing, formatting, saving, and only printing when the PRINT key is pressed.  In theory, it could be used in TW mode without the monitor, except that there are no indicator lights to show if it's in TW mode, if the caps lock is on, or if the unit is even turned on.  A removable plastic cover covers the keyboard and part of the sound shield when not in use.


The monitor is a 12" amber (P3) monochrome monitor on a swivel stand.  It plugs into the main unit using the same DE9 connector as a monochrome PC monitor.  Supposedly the unit supports dual monitors, but I'm not sure how it's supposed to connect, as there is only one monitor port.  The signals for the 2nd monitor maybe on the unused pins of the monitor port, requiring a Y cable to break these out for a second monitor.  The included monitor does have a power indicator light.


It appears to be in good condition, though well used.  There is a switch on the printer sound cover that senses if the cover is open or closed.  If the cover is open, the machine is rendered inoperable by a dialog box stating that the cover is open.  The cover switch appears to be faulty, and would not close when the cover was in the down position.  After trying to align it, I removed the plug base from the system board and replaced it with a jumper shunt.  Aside from noise, I see know other reason for this switch to be there.  The unit came with one unlabeled disk, which is either blank or corrupted.  It came with a carbon print ribbon, but no daisy wheel or correction tape.  Luckily, I was able to find a starter kit, which included all of these consumable items.  There is a carrying handle that flips under the front that is also missing.  There was no manual.  I was not able to find a manual for it, but a manual for the WP-2200 seems to cover all it's functions and capabilities, despite the 2200 being the older "luggable" style.

One thing I was curious about was how it worked, so I opened it up.  The mainboard consists of a Hitachi HD64180 CPU, which is a derivative of Zilog Z80.  There is also 64KB of SRAM, a CRT control chip, a couple of ROM chips, and some various other chips.  Essentially a setup typical of 8-bit computers of the 80s.  Judging by it's hardware and the software architecture of later models, I'm curious if it's built-in software is really a word processor running on top of an embedded version of CP/M.


Anyone else, have, use, or have any interest in electronic word processors?

This is essentially a hardware version of the word processor, or a computerized typewriter. I think this was a try of the typewriter companies to compete with the software equivalent on the microcomputers and personal computers of that era. I've never seen a typewriter like this one during my childhood, but only mechanical and electrical typewriters.
Most popular word processors in the world, didn't made their way to Israel, because they lacked RTL and hebrew language support, so people here began developing hebrew word processors such as Wordmill (Avinoam Gozner), Tamar (Shabtai Gershon), Vered (Eran Sitnik), Alef-Bet (א-ב)(Ami Greenberg), Noam (Alon Zucker), Qtext (Developed at Kibbutz Dvir), all of them developed for MS-DOS, and there was also Dagesh for Windows 3 (Irwin Rosenbaum), as well as hebrew translations of english popular word processors Einsteinwriter, Word-Perfect and WordStar.

What i seen as kid in the 90s - Everything was desktop computers. Most existing ones were between 386..486, then Pentium and Pentium MMX were the new wow things that were installed in many places in the 2nd half of the 90s. There were the occasional old ones (early 80s stuff) still in use. I dont recall seeing typewriters in use more than a couple times, and they were the most ordinary mechanical ones - with a ding bell and manual CR LF

Maybe it was like that only around me (going in various places with parents like offices/their workplaces..., my elementary school) and typewriters were used more elsewhere, this i dont know

The word processors i recall in professional use were various processors which i dont know and dont remember (probably from Dor's list), and in the 2nd half of the 90s mostly Microsoft Word by Hebrew users. As i was increasingly interested in computers allready back then, i met more peeps that write/type in English, and often in unformatted text. I recall that they sometimes used code editors like Turbo or various other plaintext editors like Norton Commander's editor to write their texts



Dor there was also Oren editor. Many early 90s science schoolbooks were written in it because it had fairly advanced formula editor and technical drawing capabilities for its time

I have somewhere an original box with floppies and hard copy manual of one of the last versions of Oren (around 1995), but the thing needs a parallel port dongle (that was to prevent pirating the software) and that is missing. In the mid 90's most of those local editors died off as Microsoft Word 6 supported Hebrew properly by then. Also many of them were for DOS and allthough they could run natively in a shell like windows 3.11 or ex-DOS systems like Windows 95, but they were less convenient to use than native Windows applications so that might have been what made everyone move away from them

These were seen as an alternative to a full computer for word processing.  In the early-80s, there was a lot of promise to the idea of the home computer, from things like learning programming, home automation, recipe databases, word processing and productivity, and games.  By the late-80s, some of the interest had waned.  Programming was compelling only if you had an interest in it and the time to devote to learning.  Home automation never really panned out, and on the single task 8-bit machines of the 80s, if a computer was setup for home automation, that was all it could do/  Recipe management required a large amount of data entry, and cook books were just more practical.  Gaming was popular, but they were facing competition from game consoles like the Sega Master System and the NES.  For productivity, Computers worked fine, but could be expensive, after purchasing the computer, monitor (if not internal), printer, and word processing software.  For much less money, one could get one of these word processor units, which came with everything needed in one box.

I figured out the dual screen thing.  It doesn't actually use dual monitors, it just runs in split-screen mode, so 2 documents can be opened at a time.  Copying disks is also an interesting process.  With only one drive, the contents have to be read into memory, the source disk removed, the destination disk inserted, than the contents get written to it.  Since the formatted capacity of a disk is 240KB, and it only has 64KB of RAM, with around 32KB usable, it requires swapping disks about 8 times to copy a nearly full floppy disk.

The 8-Bit Guy did an interesting video about these.  His Brother was basically the older suitcase style version, but aside from the layout of the components, they are identical.

I got a second one that was in better shape, but it came with no monitor, and less embedded cigarette smoke.  I did discover that the floppy drives aren't working because the drive belts have deteriorated and need to be replaced.  Would still like to get a hold of copies of the spreadsheet and tetris disks.