14 Mar
2007
14 Mar
'07
9:55 a.m.
On 14 Mar 2007 at 11:19, Brian L. Stuart wrote:
Personally, I think this is exactly why they
aren't very interesting.
Because they are so much like a general-purpose system, they
don't have a particularly interesting hardware design, almost
by definition. Their software is usually not particularly interesting
either. But you are captive in that software. You can't really do
anything interesting with them, except type letters. And for the
most part, they didn't have much influence on the rest of computing.
So, there's not much to draw me, or I suspect a lot of others, to
them.
That's mostly a matter of will. There were several interesting
applications (such as VEDIT) ported to the Displaywriter. Many WP
packages have spreadsheet and database software available. As far as
architecture, an old AES 800 WP is about as exciting as architecture
of the time gets--a custom ECL CPU supported by several 8080's doing
the peripheral I/O. I'd love to own one of those.
Even an early Brother or Smith-Corona box has its charm. I suspect
that internals are hard to come by mostly because they were viewed as
"trade secrets", but they're not hard to ferret out. But the SCM
boxes often provided a terminal emulator as well as XMODEM data
transfer.
And let's not forget that "computers" like the QX-10 weren't all that
far from being word processors, what with integrated Valdocs and
whatnot.
Some of the old CPT systems had what must have almost certainly been
Beehive or Microdata terminals on them, given the "page edit" mode of
operation.
Cheers,
Chuck