 I have a new keyboard. This is my shiny new IBM 6780 electronic typewriter. It's a 1985 typewriter by IBM. It's more of a word processor really. I believe it's the German branded version of the System 40 Quietwriter. This version has the international keyboard which you can see by all the cool symbols. IBM would normally put English labels on all of these. This keyboard by the way is a Model M clicky keyboard and it is the clickiest clicky keyboard I've ever met. It is so loud. Apparently it's even louder than Beamsprings but it feels gorgeous. It's got this cute little screen here which is used for the word processor software. The actual computer part of this thing is in the back of the machine. This is a thermal printer unit. At least I believe it's thermal. I haven't fiddled with it yet. It prints bitmap fonts using these cute little font cartridges. It uses gorgeous output. I got this as a local pickup of a eBay alike in Switzerland for the wonderful price of 30 francs which is about two francs a kilo I believe. This thing weighs a flipping ton. It's also absolutely filthy as you can see from the keycaps and needs some maintenance. So I am going to do that and also do a teardown and tour of this thing because it is absolutely lovely. So the first thing which needs working on is these. These are cartridges for expandability. This one contains the actual word processing software. I don't know why IBM thought that it would be useful to have interchangeable software for these machines. I did find a wonderful publicity video from the mid 80s about how great these things are and they did mention that you can get other software packs but they all seem really boring like typing tutors. This one is a 64k RAM upgrade because you can store documents internally on this. It's got 32k built in and this is another 64k of battery backed RAM and of course the battery in here is you know kind of 30 years old. 30 40 35 years old. Wow I feel old. So back on the workbench here they are. This is the German model as I said which means all these things are labeled in I was going to say labeled in German but I now notice there are four different languages on both of these. I wonder if you can change the language. The program cartridge is should be a ROM. I wonder if I can get that open. Interesting to see what's inside. The storage cartridge has a battery in it. That looks okay actually. The contacts don't look bad. There's a internal battery there which probably wants to look again. Can I get this thing open? We'll just test the battery. It's probably going to be completely flat. I've had the machine turned on for a few hours which is probably not a great idea. 3.6 volts. Now I don't know what this is. It's longer than your usual AAA. It's got lots of warning labels on it and nothing else. Interesting. Absolutely no idea. The only labeling on it is IBM Reorder 1362405 but doing web searches produces nothing. Here it is compared to an ordinary AAA so you can see it is longer and very slightly thicker. Now this thing is both clipped and screwed together and sadly I am going to have to break the label to get the screws open. Okay and this unclips. What do we see? We have a spring loaded thingamajig that pushes into the contact on the actual typewriter. Here is the internal battery. We have some SRM2064Ms. These are 8k static RAMs. Let's take the board out. Yep and there are 8 of them giving a total of 64k of RAM. And this battery is well glued in. Can't possibly be holding charge but it's not bulging and it's not leaking. 2.6 volts. You know I'm going to leave this in. I think we're going to leave both of them in. I don't know what this is but it's pretty exotic so if this hasn't leaked by now then I suspect we're all right. Okay and this thing yeah there's more screws here. This is just going to be some ROM so I'm not going to tinker with this. It's not very interesting and I don't want to break the label. Okay well that's actually in much better shape than I thought it was going to be. I have seen the other battery and that is not in good shape so that was anticlimactic in the right kind of way. So I'll put this back together and then get back to the machine. So the next thing we have to deal with is this. This backpack here contains the actual computer part. Inside these hatches are an expansion port. I'm not quite sure what this hole is. We'll take a look at that later. And in this one is the battery compartment and these batteries have leaked. However rather than work with it here on my dining room table, there we go, I am instead going to pull out these two plastic things and you'll notice by the nasty white cruddy stuff on this that those batteries are not in good shape and the spews their guts all over the inside of the machine. And then this comes off and the keyboard just unplugs and it's got one of these which is one of the weirdest plugs I've ever seen. So this being IBM it's been well designed. Yeah you can see there's a green stain there. So all the battery goop has been carefully routed into this gutter there where it's drained down through the hole for this thing and into the guts of the machine. So I'm going to take this thing to the workbench and open it up and see if there's any damage inside. So it is kind of big. We've got the edge connector here. This is another edge connector. That's interesting. I wonder what that's for. You know there's the various things are labeled. Take this off. This then unhooks and that unplugs. Yeah it smells of battery slime. Okay great. So what do we have here? Here are the cartridge slots. There's two program carts and a storage card. This is the program ROM. This is I don't know what that is. There's the heatsink suggest it's a driver of some description. I bet this is the CPU 8505 Intel 82. See I thought these things used 8088. This could be the processor in here. Oh I know what this is. This connector is where it plugs into the rest of the actual computer. The typewriter that is. There's a plug on the motherboard for this. This is the keyboard connector. Honestly that looks in pretty good shape. There's goo around here. This case is going to need washing. I am going to need to take the lid off. What holds this PCB down? Clips. Clips I believe. So I have boiling water with food grade citric acid aka citron and sour in it. It's the stuff they use for the scaling kettles. Okay that's not frothing up too badly. This is a containment dish in case it goes bad, which it's obviously not so I'll get rid of that. Wow the smell. So so I think that is now clean. Okay one bit which is bad is going to be the battery compartment itself because good design has saved the computer but all that goop will be the first place it's going to go is this battery holder and that's interesting. That's a generic battery holder. I think I've got some of those in storage. And I think the rest of it is fine. While I'm waiting for this I am actually going to take a moment to remove the ROM and dump it. This is a 16k ROM containing 8286 code so yeah. I looked up this and the only 8505 I can find belonging to Intel is a Pentium and I don't think that's it but I do believe that is the CPU. Well that was a miserable experience but the board does indeed come off revealing no damage on the back. Excellent. Let's fish a stray spring out of my citric acid which is now nice and shiny. I think that what this white stuff is is not so much battery goop as it's the silver coating from these pegs that's come off. That's decomposed in the battery goop. You can actually see shiny bits in the bottom of the mug. Okay and now we go back to the dining room table because we need to take the lid off. So then it's actually in two parts. There's this piece which is the bit that you normally access when you want to get at these. The two fonts are these gorgeous little font cartridges that click into place super positively. This is the ribbon which is some kind of plastic. It's amazingly complicated. You can see all the arms moving to get the thing off. You push that forward and this just lifts out revealing the works. So now I have to figure out how to put the plastic thing back on again. That looks about right. That was actually less bad than I thought it was going to be. So the entire lid comes off revealing the mechanism. So this is, well that's where the computer module plugs in. So we have what's clearly a driver board for one of the big stepper motors. I bet that this is another board. This connects to the the printhead. There's another massive stepper motor. There's not actually a lot to it. This box here will be the power supply which is enormous. Okay so regarding battery goop I can see some here and that's actually not so bad. So that will clean out reasonably easily. I think it may have actually even drained the battery slime out of the case. That would be really nice. Not so great for the owner of whatever this thing was sitting on at the time but it's fine for me and that's the only thing that matters. Okay so this I will just give a brush. Actually nothing's really coming off. I think this is fine. This is in way better shape than I feared. I thought there was going to be a huge puddle of electrolytic fluid inside and you know like this cleaning off whatever it is and bad traces. So that's pretty cool. So we have the very clicky key switches. The screen unit. The screen unit actually on plugs like so and the screen is a little bit scratched. Recently good Nick. In fact this will fit on my workbench just so let's do it here where everything is easier to see. So you can see the Swiss German layout with the accent characters because we have both the German key the German accents and the French accents and also the Italian and Romance accents plus dead keys plus the cool green symbols and these and everything. The keys themselves if I just pull the first one are one shot things printed. So one shot one piece things and printed. They are pretty monolithic. Many Model M keys including my Unicomp classic which is over there which I normally type on use two piece keys where the piece that fits into the key itself is smaller and then there's a shell clips on top of that that's got the printing in it but this doesn't and also each key you've never seen this before in a Model M has a dampening ring around it. This apparently is quite old. Apparently it's a kind of halfway step between the Model Fs and the the newer Model M's that were shipped on PCs and I'm not allowed to use a normal Model M at work let alone this thing. So let's switch into time-lapse while I pull all the keys and then I suppose we're going to have to wash them. So this goes aside for cleaning. This is the keyboard mechanism proper and anyone who's used to Model M's will see that this is a classic barrel plate with heat riveted rivets and this is actually really good shape. All the rivets are in place. That's almost unheard of. We've got a rather fluffy cable and the logic board which is huge. I want to look at this. This does not want to come off. There we go. Right and there are two ribbon cables for the actual membrane are plugged in here. No I'm not going to. Oh this will come off. Okay and this reveals the logic board is a thing. This is the keyboard controller. I do not know whether these are additional controllers because of course the screen plugs in here. Now I suspect that the keyboard communicates the rest of the computer via serial protocol. This will and this thing is then sending commands to the screen. I don't know what the screens got in it and here is the top chassis for the keyboard which is disgusting. Complete with the extra key strip. This is for the spell checker. I don't actually know whether the software has the spell checker built into it but we'll see. Okay now I think we've got all the plastic bits off that I want to clean so I'm going to have to clean them now. Now so let's reassemble it. So back here at the table I have reassembled the machine. We now need to reinstall the cartridge. So we open the lid. Here is the printhead which moves slowly. This lever on the side here controls whether the cartridge can be removed or reinserted or ready for printing. You see it moves a lot of arms. So we put it into the forwards position where all the arms are retracted. We drop the cartridge in in hopefully the right place. There we go like so and we bring the levers and you can see it stretch out the ribbon there. So here we are with the machine set up and ready to demo. So I'm going to actually open the lid so you can see all the works and press the big red switch to power the thing on and it boots up. And as a short pause that beep was it telling me that the battery is flat which is perfectly normal because there is no battery. So to get past that error you can see on the screen here I press this button. Okay it is now ready for use. Let's put some paper in it. Do that load it here and then we do this and now it's ready for use. In its default mode it's basically a typewriter. Press key receive letter. It buffers everything so that I can keep typing and it'll print it when it can. In this mode it's kind of odd to use but you do at least get immediate feedback. You can also set it to buffered mode with the P key and you can see the icon there telling us that we're in buffered mode and you'll notice that whenever I do something it will twitch the printhead as feedback that you've actually done it. So let me put the paper back where it was and type it something in again and you can see it doesn't print it on the paper but we see the text appear on the screen and in this mode it will only print when it reaches the end of the line. So if we type some more it prints it like so. In typewriter mode well in any mode you get the usual collection of IBM typewriter features. So we can set the margins. The left one is all right but if we set it manually with this you can see it twitches the thing. Oh yes I'm pressing the space bar to try and move the cursor on but of course we're in buffered mode so if I put it back into instant mode like so we can now move the head like this. Let me set the right hand margin. Now it knows where the margins are we can do stuff like center to text. So with code C every time I press the key it does half a space backwards when I press return it prints it. You also get useful stuff like underlining which works as you would expect. The weird thing is it does the underlying by printing a letter and then back spacing printing the underlying which is not what I'd expect. The print head is actually drawing bitmaps which are stored in the ROM cartridges so there's no reason at all why it couldn't just assemble the data in memory and print it all in one go which would actually be faster. Other things you can do are we can switch to the other font because of course there's two cartridges which is a sort of weird sans thing. You can print text in double width like so in of course either font. Let's turn that off again. We have this one which is terribly useful. This is capitalized text. Not quite sure why that's a thing but it is a thing. Let's turn that off again and about the only things remaining for this are we can do superscripts which just goes up half a line like so and we can do of course subscripts like so. Oh that's interesting that didn't work quite the way I expected. You can tell I've done my research. That is only superscripted and subscripted one letter which is presumably useful for formally. Okay you can set tabs by simply putting the cursor where you want it and pressing tab plus. So left turn up one up two. You also have if I get this correctly decimal tabs so I can do okay that icon there I think it says t comma. You can set this to be the decimal decimal points to be either a full stop or a comma. This is of course the German model of keyboard so let's manually set it to a full stop by pressing this in the dot. You can quite do what I expected. I did read the instructions on this. Anyway let's try this. Now that has actually worked and you can see that it's lined up the dot with tab stop and that's basically about it. There is one feature I have not mentioned yet and it is this thing's party trick. Let us type some text. I have typed you can actually see it on the screen here. This text has a tie-up and the text is in there. Is that visible on the camera? Hopefully just. Now I can correct my text by using the delete key so now I can type in the corrected text. Let's go back to the original font which is easier to read. Somehow this machine is capable of taking the ink off the paper. Of course if you're in line at a time mode you can just you know delete it and re-type. That's what line at a time mode is for but when you are in instant mode this is an incredibly useful feature. Let's go back to here and let's put our other font on. Nope there we go original font. This is an incredibly useful feature for correcting mistakes. I have no idea how it does it. Other machines like this have a correction ribbon which is capable of basically pulling the ink off the paper. Others will type over it again in white. This one has neither of these. Somehow it's using the ink ribbon to correct its own mistakes. I don't know how. I've looked at the ribbon after it's done it and you can see like a scraped patch but it works amazingly well and is very cool. So that is it as a typewriter but this is more than that. It's also a word processor. We can record documents into its internal memory or onto the memory cartridge which you can't see over there. Now the way we do this is we open a document by holding down this key and typing in the file name which is a two digit number. So this is document one. Now everything we type is recorded into memory and as we type it of course prints it because we're still in instant typing mode. We press this again to close the document and now we can replay it by holding down this key and typing the file name like so. If we don't want to waste paper we can actually put it into no printing mode. So let us open document number two which turns out to have text in it. Interesting. But we can now use the cursor keys to edit the text like this. It's not a great word processor. You can see it's kind of slow and of course you only get one line of text to deal with. You can go up and down with the cursor keys. I don't know what that's doing there. I don't know where this text came from. It's probably left from zero computer festivals so I should probably be slightly careful about what I show on video in case it's something I can't show on video. But this gives us a great opportunity to try the delete function which is this one. If I put the cursor here on the A we can turn on delete mode. We can delete to the right. We can delete to the left. We can also delete to the end of the document with this button like so. Turn delete mode off and here is our first line of text. Here is the second and the document ends here. Annoyingly you can't use the erase button which is this one to delete to the left. That would have been really useful but it will only delete recently typed characters otherwise it just produces this error message. This key by the way is not the delete button. This is the backspace key. We've got an A there. If I do a backspace. Okay you can't do a backspace in this mode. Sometimes you can do a backspace. Let me try doing another A. Okay it can only backspace over recent characters but I can now put in a double quote. You see it's appeared here on the screen. Let's close the document and print it. Oh yeah we can't print stuff if printing is turned off. So we do that. Has it put us back to the yeah it's put us back to the sans font again. Let's print document too and you can see here it's done the backspace. Again it's done it by printing it backspacing and over printing which is an odd choice. Okay I think we're running out of paper so let's just go to the other side. Okay I've been sloppy with my research and I haven't tried this so we'll see what happens. Oh too. Right that has actually worked the way I expected it to. This has printed justified text. You can see that the characters do not line up even though this is a monospace font which is a nice feature. Okay other things you can do you can of course edit pre-existing documents. You just saw me do that. I can load that up again. Let's go into non-printing no I'll leave it in printing mode so you can see what happens. You can search forward using the search button as if I want to change the fox into a alpaca. All we do is we want to search for fox. It moves the cursor there. Delete forward out of delete mode alpaca. You see that as I type what I'm typing comes out on the screen even though it's not typing the rest of it. Let's change this to like so and each change I made is printed on a new line so we can get rid of this. Let's type some more here I think. The beep was the warning that we're reaching the end of the line. This is very traditional from old typewriters that would ring a bell. So anyway if you've done that document let's try printing it again with justification should be more obvious now. Yes you can see the hard line at the end and let's just go back to here and print it normally. Of course if you've got multiple documents in memory then you need to be able to see what documents you have and you do that with code D. This prints the directory. We have two storage devices. 00 is internal. 99 is the cartridge. Here are the files that are in use. Here's 01 and 02 that we've been working on here. Some other stuff. These are paragraph styles. Now the machine's got about I think about 32k on board memory. If we open the document and then do code X you can see on the screen we're in document one. This document has used 30 bytes. There are 25k bytes remaining. So we close that and let's put into no print mode. We can open the document that is on the cartridge. I hope and I've taken the battery out of the memory pack so hopefully it hasn't corrupted. We go to the open document button and we press this which gives you an equal sign. Very intuitive and then we enter the file name. If you know from there is 01. And here is our document. And again if we do code X we can see document one the equal sign means it's on the cartridge. 12 bytes used 64k remaining. And save. Now print mode on. These F things. Paragraph styles. Well you remember that we set some tabs earlier. We can see the way the paragraph style is set up by holding down this key. So this shows us that our left margin is at position five. We have tabs at position 20, 26 and 52. And the right margin is at 79. If I do paragraph style button and one. And let go. We are now in paragraph style one. Which you can see has got nothing set. So we need to set the margins again. Okay. Let's put a tab here. Tab here. Tab here. So that we can now see that we're not in paragraph style one anymore. See the one's gone there. It's just set the default paragraph style. Okay. I must have done something to go out of paragraph style mode. So I've just put tab 46 in and you see it showing up here. Right. As I say I've been skimping slightly on the research. So let's put the left margin here. That's updated to four. We put the right margin here. Actually let's put the left margin here. This one. Okay. So we've got 41 and 81. So now as we type like so and we can switch to a different paragraph style by using a different number. You get 10. So we go to paragraph style two. This is not set up. So the margins are zero and 132. So zero is slightly off the end of the paper. Why is that not? Oh yes. I need to press the T button again to get out of paragraph style mode. It wants me to set it up. So let's do that. Let's put this over here and save. Okay. So now we've got those two set up. We can at any point switch to the other paragraph style with T1. T. Why is that not doing what I wanted? I didn't know it did this. It remembered what I typed. You can see it appearing on the screen. So we're now on the line on the left hand side. That's interesting. This is somewhat irritating. If we go over to here, can we change paragraph styles? No, we can't. So we have to go to the bottom of the document before we can change styles. Yes, I did try this earlier but I didn't backspace up over the text. So anyway, style one. There we go. We are now in style one. And that's a style two. And you see, it does work. Because this is the German model, you get all the normal things you would expect from a German keyboard such as accents. However, you can see if I can back up to where those accents were. Well, now it's not doing it anymore. Who knows? However, you can also compose your own accents. So if we want an N oom lout, you can type in an N backspace. Oom lout. And we now have an N oom lout on the paper and on the screen. In fact, I did that wrong. The accents characters do not advance the printhead. So if we do that the right way, we do accent letter. And this will work for all the accents like so. However, because this is a German keyboard, you may notice that the layout's a bit weird. And there's a certain thing missing, which is the exclamation mark. There are two ways of getting an exclamation mark. You can either do it the German way, which is to type an apostrophe backspace dot. And you see here we have the exclamation mark. The other way is to simply switch it to a UK keyboard, which we can do with this six seven, which is the so we're now on alternate keyboard. Six seven is the code for the British keyboard. And then we get to the more usual layout with a exclamation mark as a single character. And you can see it actually renders slightly differently from the composed version. Okay, let's get some more paper stores and paper. Okay, we are going to write a letter. So turn off printing. And we are going to write this to document 11. Okay. So dear, we don't know who is to. So we insert a stop code to indicate that this will be filled out later. And we can enter a comment to remind us what it's for. Dear name. I am writing to you concerning your an animal. It is very spell that correctly. This keyboard is amazing. Save. Okay, let's print it. Replay. Document 11. Turn printing on. It will let you print an immediate mode, but then the documents come out weird. It's only works properly in buffered mode. Important tip. Okay, he wants a name. He wants an animal. Now it wants a quality. Continue. And there is our document. Correctly formatted is put all the line spacing in the right time. The it's put the word wrapping incorrectly. The quality field extended from here to here. So you see it spans a line. All work very nicely. Let's do this again. Okay, name. Continue. The animal is called the dragon. The quality is endangered. And there we have the second document also correctly word wrapped. This paragraph is only two lines where the one above was three. Everything has just worked. If you were a traditional secretary doing form letters, this would be a godsend. And in fact, I do know of one company that today is using an earlier model of one of these typewriters to do just that. So I am going to call it here because firstly, I'm a little worried that I'll try to demonstrate a feature that I don't know how to use. But I think I've covered most of them. The second is I'm also a little bit concerned about when I'm going to run out of ribbon because there's not a lot left. I will note some buttons here for doing file copying in and out of other documents. This lets you control the line spacing. I habitually have it set to one and a half line spacing. But it goes to three or one. So I'll leave it there. It's a surprisingly simple machine once you figure out how it works. And I think we've mostly covered everything. Good. So what am I going to do with this? Well, the answer is not a lot really. I don't really have use for a giant typewriter. This bit is going to go into storage. However, this bit, the keyboard, I am going to do some work on this. We will probably show up in future videos because I want to reverse engineer the keyboard protocol. I have a suspicion that it's the standard 80 keyboard protocol. It's a surprisingly competent half duplex clocked protocol which supports transferring about 20k a second. And I know that other machines of this model, the keyboards speak that protocol. And honestly, if I was wanting to send bytes back down the line to the microcontroller for displaying on the screen here, I would use the protocol that was already there. The 80 protocol is perfectly capable of doing this. But I won't know that until I actually try it, which will happen maybe. I would love to use this keyboard as a daily driver. It just sounds so amazingly loud. I will not be able to use this at work. Okay, so only one more thing to say which is I hope you've enjoyed this video. Please let me know what you think in the comments.