 I have a new typewriter. This is a brother LW30 electronic typewriter word processor. As far as I know, this was made sometime in the early 1990s. Actually finding information on these things is really hard. So back in the 70s, 80s and 90s there were a whole line of appliance computers that were not sold as computers. They were sold as typically word processors and this is one of them. There were a lot of others, the most famous being the Amstrad PCW. They were aimed squarely at people who didn't want to own a computer or no have to look after one or no have to program one because remember back in the days when this thing came out, computers meant Windows 3.1 and MS-DOS. This was aimed at people who just wanted to turn it on and start typing. So let's put it on the workbench and try it out. So the first thing you notice when you actually get the thing onto the workbench is that it's very, very made out of plastic. All the parts are clipped together and the result is a bit, well, kind of loud. It doesn't feel particularly shoddy. It's good and solid but it's just not a nice noise. I'd much rather they'd use, you know, screws. But anyway that's kind of beside the point. What you get is the keyboard which I shall get on to later. The screen which is a transflective passive thing. You can see that it's been attacked a little by the dreaded LCD worm but it's still mostly good. The screen folds up to give you access to the printer lid and also give you a bit of angle. And inside here is the actual printer. And it's a classic Daisy Wheel. It's just like my other IBM, although all the parts are incompatible. So you've got the plastic film which is carbon impregnated. You've got a hammer which hammers type against the paper through the film and there's a removable print wheel which actually contains the type. I only have this one which is 10-pitch Braulcombe or something. It's like the most most 80s font ever. So let me just load it all back up again like so. And it has a safety switch here to which means the mechanism won't work if the lids open. But as I want to get some video I'm just going to stick this pencil in. Do not get your fingers in the works. So power on. So it homes the head and then rotates the print wheel until it hits a notch so that it knows which type is upright. Now I'm just going to set it into typewriter mode, load some paper and actually do some typing because it's cool. So some paper. I'll show you typewriter mode with the screen down later. I keep bumping the contrast knob and the screen becomes invisible. So here is a sentence. And there you go. The print quality is really nice. It's sharp and crisp and there's a perfect transfer from the carbon paper. A carbon paper plastic film. So anyway let's close the lids and it re-homes the printhead because it thought I had the lid open. And let's talk about the keyboard because the keyboard is really nice. It's a dome with slider affair that apparently feels very much like modern topra keyboards which cost considerably more than five francs and you don't get a printer to go with it. If I pull one of the keycaps off there these really interesting, is it focused? Probably. These really interesting triple shot plastic keys with three different types of plastic. I was expecting this to like be just printed on but they're not. The key feel is light but very tactile. The keys pop up and down very nicely and it's the feel of effortless and light to type on. I'd really like to have this keyboard as my primary keyboard for working on. The only small problems are that it's like the German layout as you can see from here and well you can't get it out really. Anyway let me just refocus onto the screen because I want to talk about the software. So when you start the thing up you get to dump directly into the word processor. There are a couple of applications other than the word processor available which I'll show you later. The screen is this rather nice transfective green thing. It shows 80 columns of text with 14 lines which is actually a decent amount for a thing this size. I really like the look of this. This screen is a bit damaged you can see it's been attacked by the dreaded LCD worm and there's a missing column here but it still works reasonably well. You can adjust the contrast using this very easy to accidentally nudge knob. That seems to be showing up reasonably well on the screen. You can start typing immediately and you know it just works. You don't have to load anything which is actually amazingly convenient. Let's try writing a simple letter just to see how it works. So any good letter starts with the sender's address on the right hand side so we move the cursor up to about here. This looks good. Insert a tab with code T plus and type in my address and of course the date very important. Now we can get on to the actual body of the letter and of course this typewriter supports bold type and the way this actually works is that it will print the letters in bold multiple times moving the printhead a little bit each time. It actually looks pretty good. It's got the usual word processor features such as you know automatic word wrapping and so on not always taken for granted with these very early machines. It's got a few interesting quirks so it starts out in overwrite mode. If you want to put it into insert mode which is now the standard you have to explicitly do code insert. Sincerely has to be in lowercase of course and here we have your letter. Now you notice that scrolling up and down is not so quick. This is a bit of a problem with this machine. It's very slow. For just typing it will keep up and it's nice and brisk and combined with the nice snappy keyboard it's actually quite a pleasant thing to work with but going back and editing stuff oh dear. It wouldn't be so bad if it had a proper page up page down but it doesn't. If you try it just scrolls a line at a time and it's so slow. You can jump to the beginning of other pages if your document is long enough to spread across multiple pages. That's paper pages not screen pages but this one isn't and yeah it's got the usual editing features although the interface is a bit weird so I can copy text using the copy thing in the menu so I say I want to copy this to here. It does it. You can of course block delete text the same way so menu block version done. It's got the it's got usual features like I can center text or coming to terms with some of them. There we go. It will actually just show you control codes telling you what you're doing in the document itself. It's a nice enough feature. It's an adequate word processor. It's not particularly sophisticated but for writing simple documents it works just fine. It doesn't really have very many features but it's not really intended to. This being the German model it's got dead keys and lots of accents on the keyboard. Yes I did remember to type that you umlaut but I can either use the German key here or press umlaut U and that works. That's about it really. Now I can change the margins using a rather old-fashioned typewriter mode so what you do is you put the cursor on the margin you want to change press left margin and it changes it. Let's change the right margin to here and it will reformat your document for you which is nice. It supports multiple rulers in your document so because I changed the margin here you see it's put the control code there to tell me I've done it. This is the line where the margin to take effect so I can put in another margin here. Interesting. I'm still getting the grips for some of this. I don't use this very much the occasional letter only and I don't use any of these features. Yeah anyway to release the margin to use a very old-fashioned typewriter system which is the margin release. You put the cursor on the margin you want to change press this one. This then allows me to backspace outside the current margin so I say put the margin there and it will change it. So to do the other one I, where was the old margin? The old margin is there. So I put on the right margin, margin release, in fact I did put it in the wrong place so let's do that again properly and that's basically it. The machine has enough memory to store about 11 A4 pages of text though I can't imagine that you would want to write particularly long documents on it due to the rather irritating scroll speed. But even if that wasn't there, 11 pages is actually a reasonable amount of text to be useful. If you were writing a novel you wouldn't be using one of these things. You'd be using a better machine. This is intended for light correspondence and letters and that sort of thing which it does very well. But anyway we have our document. We need to print it now. I'm just going to re-aim the camera. I've jimmied the safety so I'll just insert some paper and let it run and here is the result in close-up. Beautiful nice crisp typing. I always feel that this ends up looking much better than anything out of a laser printer. It just seems somehow crisper. I suspect part of that is the physical impact of the head against the paper. It indents it slightly. Of course in this day and age actually just writing letters and printing them onto paper isn't enough. We also want to be able to store documents electronically and luckily this machine has you covered because it supports floppy disks. So we insert the disk into the drive and we hit the file button and we tell it we want to save the document. Now I do actually have a earlier version of this letter on the disk so we just tell it to overwrite that and it does so. The disks are standard three and a half inch double-density disks but the format is exceedingly weird. They don't even spin at the same speed as normal PC disks. The machines will store about 240 kilobytes on a disk. It's a bizarre encoding that PCs normally won't touch. Luckily my flux engine project will actually read and write a brother wordpress as a disk so I can get my document off the disk and onto a PC and back again but I'm not going to talk about that for now. Instead let's take a look at the other programs on this disk. For that I need to zoom back in again. So this is the file browser. It shows my one file which is all of half a kilobyte. PlainTek isn't very big. Your 240 kilobytes of data actually goes quite a long way on this but we've got three different applications here. There's the word processor, Neu.Doc. We've got this which is a database and this which I'll get onto in a moment. Let's have a look at the database. It's a very very simple card file so it's got multiple columns. You can have as many as you like up to a reasonable limit. They are fixed size so you can't actually put more in there. You can make the columns bigger but again they're still fixed size. You can have a bunch of them etc and you can save them to disk. Now the reason for this is this is to allow mail merge features. If in my letter I had replaced like the names with M codes which you insert using code M here you can refer to fields in the database and you can then print off multiple copies of the letter using all the different records in the database. It's for doing form letters to multiple people. I have never had a reason to use this since I stopped receiving birthday presents as a child because you know I would write thank you letters and I did use a mail merge system to automate them. Please don't tell my relatives. But the third item is this. I am still trying to figure out what it is actually for because it's a drawing program and it will actually let you print out your diagrams although they don't print very well. The horizontal lines are drawn using underscores the vertical lines are drawn using dots. Now I don't have the manual for this. I haven't been able to find it and the online documentation is all in German which is you know comprehensive but it's in German. Now I believe that what this is for is designing forms and I know that you can print them. I think you may also be able to use the mail merge features. You don't seem to be able to actually enter text which is odd so I'm still trying to figure that out. I have never actually had any reason to use this whatsoever but you can create your forms and you can save them to disk in usual way so you can save our lovely drawing. But there is a fourth feature which actually I was clued into by this label here which I believe dates from when this thing was in a showroom. What it's doing is it's inviting you to run the demo disk and it's instructing you to insert the demo disk into the drive and then press code queue and if I do code queue what it does is it looks at the disk and then complains that the disk is not a program disk and this is because you could actually get third-party software for these word processors. I know there was a spreadsheet available and the machines came with a typing tutor which people are instantly reformatted and used to store documents on because disks were expensive in those days and I would love to get my hands on one of these program disks because as I can read and write the disks if I can figure out the executable file format I can figure out how to write my own software for one of these things and I bet that one of these machines would run CPM rather well. The reason why I would run CPM is that I've taken the lid off and it is based on a Z80. Let me show you inside. So actually getting the thing open is excruciating. It's not actually difficult it's just so many horrible little plastic clips you have to stab your screwdriver in on the inside to lever these things open and it's combined with this horrible scrunchy plastic noises. It's not fun but once you get inside you end up with the simplest construction possible. You've got the print mechanism here and all the works make the printer work is here. I believe it's just a off-the-shelf unit. What we describe here which is a dedicated brother unit attached by this rather interesting interface board to the PCB. The PCB is this utterly cheap single-sided affair. It's based around a 64-180 Z80 clone. We have an interesting double-decker thing here which I believe is the RAM. This ROM here is the software. We've got a couple of other controller chips which run the screen and the keyboard and the printer and the floppy disk drive etc etc etc and that's essentially all there is to it. I did find somebody on YouTube who has ripped the guts out of one of these and replaced it with a Raspberry Pi driving the original printer and the LCD and keyboard and everything. So if you've got one of these that doesn't work that might be worth having a look. There's not really a lot of hackability here. That means there are no ioports, none whatsoever. The only way of getting stuff on and off the machine is through the floppy disk drive. It might be interesting to remove the ROM and read it because that would show you what the software was inside. It may be that's probably the easiest route to getting third-party software on the thing but there's really nothing else to it. I mean half the box is empty and well that's actually kind of how I like to see electronics because it means they're simple. It's also worth noticing that nearly nothing here is screwed in so the board itself is just clipped in. I think the floppy disk drive does rate a screw but you've got the printer mechanism just sits there and it's horribly greasy. The keyboard itself is, the back plate is, it's actually metal but it's just clipped onto the plastic. It's astonishingly cheap. So there you have it, my brother LW30 electric typewriter word processor. A relic of a class of computing that you don't really get anymore. These kinds of dedicated appliances just don't exist which I think is a shame. It did its job very nicely given the design limitations. I know a number of people had these and have fond memories of them so they seem to have rather dropped out of history. There's very little technical information about them. I'd be interested to know details of the operating system and the programming environment. I am very much searching for the program disks for these things because now I have the technical ability to read and write brother disks. I can easily reverse engineer and or copy the program disks. Anyway I hope you enjoyed this video. Please let me know what you think.