Microwriter MW 4

[mmm]

I came across this beauty and I had to get my hands on it.



It is a word processor AND keyboard introduced in 1978. It has a total of 6 keys, which consist of microswitches with the keycap mounted directly on the lever. Extremely smooth, with a light click that can barely be felt in the fingers, giving an impression of an almost linear switch. With being mounted on a lever, it does not travel straight down like a standard slider based switch, but "rotates" down, somewhat following the movement of the finger.

How does it work? Chording, where each combination of fingers produce a characters. Only the 5 topmost buttons output characters directly, where the 6th button is used in combination with the top 4 buttons to enter different "modes", which can be uppercase, numbers, settings menu, special symbols etc. According to the manual, it should be possible to exceed "normal handwriting" speed after a few weeks of use. It even have an advertised battery life of 30 hours!

I am yet to figure out all of the functions, and the machine seems to freeze up every time I attempt to write more than 6-10 characters. But the features are vast, offering features such as saving to cassette tape, outputting to an external monitor, working as keyboard and much more!

Interesting unique piece of tech, that's for sure. Manuals and some extended history can be found here.

More pictures:

Spoiler:

[Findecanor]

Awesome find! I'm a little bit jealous. Thanks for posting!

[jsheradin]

Very nice piece of equipment! Needless to say please replace those blue tantalum capacitors; I spy at least 4. They almost universally fail closed which can damage any power regulation they're meant to stabilize. They would be my first guess for the instability too. Another cause could be one of those HM6116 RAM chips either being bad or not making good contact in the socket. Might want to try reseating or swapping them around and see if it helps or changes the behavior. You can pinpoint a bad one with an Arduino and some breadboard.

[goodwill_pillager]

That is in awesome shape for how old it is, congrats.

[Muirium]

It's been sleeping in that delux velour pouch all this time, like a true child of the seventies.

Really does look ahead of its time. How would you even get your text off a thing like that when the only computers around were mutually incompatible home micros? I'd never have guessed a thing like this existed before at least XT/AT.

[mmm]

Very nice piece of equipment! Needless to say please replace those blue tantalum capacitors; I spy at least 4. They almost universally fail closed which can damage any power regulation they're meant to stabilize. They would be my first guess for the instability too. Another cause could be one of those HM6116 RAM chips either being bad or not making good contact in the socket. Might want to try reseating or swapping them around and see if it helps or changes the behavior. You can pinpoint a bad one with an Arduino and some breadboard.

Thanks!

It'll be a little while before I get to this one due to projects piling up, but I'll probably get to this, eventually. I haven't done vintage electronics repairs (beside keyboards) before, so I might reach out if I get confused, if that's alright.

It's been sleeping in that delux velour pouch all this time, like a true child of the seventies.

Really does look ahead of its time. How would you even get your text off a thing like that when the only computers around were mutually incompatible home micros? I'd never have guessed a thing like this existed before at least XT/AT.

It's leather!

The manual is very comprehensive, and from what I gathered by quickly looking through it, this is compatible with multiple protocols, and even has settings such as adjusting baud rate!