I know Olivetti made some bizarre looking computers based on their
electronic typewriters. The ETV300 ran CP/M and the ETV2700 ran MS-DOS.
The 300 was a grotesquely beautiful black beast.
On
Sat, 30 Aug 2003 rogersda(a)cox.net wrote:
Over the years I've worked on a number of systems
that were sold as "word
processors". They were all "computers" in the sense that they had the
standard complement of CPU, memory, mass storage and the programming was
loaded at boot time, as opposed to being in ROM.
My Diamond's the same - the ROM only contains enough to load whatever's on the
system disk. I have various floppies that were labelled as having contents
other than the standard wordprocessing application software, so although the
machine was sold by the manufacturer solely as a wordprocessor there were
obviously 3rd parties who produced other software for it.
If your definition of computer means that the OS has to be seperate from the
running application, then no, it doesn't qualify (but that knocks out most 80's
home micros that would drop straight into BASIC)
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that. There were a lot of word processing systems
that, even though they had separate system boxes, the O/S was in ROM and couldn't be
overridden. I would call that a dedicated-purpose "computer". I thought we
were distinguishing between those and GP microcomputers sold as word processors.
I'd say that a wordprocessor that *looked*
like a typewriter probably doesn't
qualify as a computer though; it's just a microprocessor-controlled typewriter.
The systems I worked on all used Diablo or Qume daisy-wheel printers for their output.
So, with separate system boxes and monitors, they didn't look like typewriters. In
fact, that's how I came to work for DEC (later compaqted, then h-PACKardED); I knew
how to make those darned printers work.
Dale (the DECdude)
M. K. Peirce
Rhode Island Computer Museum, Inc.
Shady Lea, Rhode Island
"Casta est quam nemo rogavit."
- Ovid