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The Microwriter was a hand-held portable word processor sold in the early 1980's by Microwriter Ltd, of London, UK.

The Microwriter MW4

The 'MW4' Microwriter is believed to be the only model sold in any significant quantity. The 23 cm x 12 cm x 5 cm device comprised:

• A six-button chording keyboard.
• A single line LCD display.
• An 8 bit microprocessor.
• Complete Word processing software in ROM.
• 16 Kbytes of RAM.
• Rechargeable Nickel-cadmium batteries - sufficient to run the device for several hours.
• Various interfaces (see below).

This device was capable of allowing the user to enter and edit several pages of text - and by connecting a printer to the RS-232 serial port connector, documents could be printed without the aid of a separate computer.

Keyboard

The innovative keyboard used one button for each finger and two for the thumb of the user's right hand. The five buttons that lay immediately beneath the hand were pressed in different combinations to generate letters A through Z with the second thumb button being used similarly to the Shift Lock key on a conventional keyboard to toggle through a range of modes that would allow you to switch case, enter numbers, punctuation and even ASCII control characters that could be used in editing the document being prepared. Hence to type a letter 'T', one would tap the top thumb button to shift to uppercase - then type a 't' by pressing the index finger and ring finger buttons simultaneously.

This unusual keyboard was surprisingly easy to use - most people could learn to use it in just a couple of hours. With a little practice, it was possible to become a faster typist with the Microwriter than with a conventional keyboard - providing that what was being entered was just text. Things slowed down a lot if a substantial number of special characters had to be entered using the 'shifting' mechanism.

Learning the chords for the basic letters and numbers was facilitated by a set of flash-cards that showed simple mnemonics for each character.

External ports

At the top end of the unit was a 25 pin D-type connector providing an RS-232 port, an interface to an audio cassette player for saving and restoring files and a small white on/off button. At the other end was the connector for the battery charger and a 37 pin D-type connector that could be hooked up to an optional external unit to allow the Microwriter to be connected to a television and thus to perform full-screen editing. The serial port could be used to connect the Microwriter directly to a printer - or to allow it to be plugged into a computer to function in place of the conventional keyboard.

The fate of the Microwriter

Despite all of this innovation, its endorsement by writer Douglas Adams, and the fact that there was no similar product on the market, the Microwriter was not a great success and ceased production in 1985. It is likely that the chording keyboard put off many potential users - although users of the device reported that in practice they could learn to use it after just one or two hours of practice and gained proficiency after a few days of normal use.

A version of the Microwriter keyboard (without electronics) was built to interface to the BBC Micro computer. It came with a game that helped you to learn the chords and there were two versions of the interface software, one optimised for entering BBC BASIC commands, the other for word processing.

A modified 5-key version of the Microwriter chording scheme was later provided on the 'Agenda' handheld device, which was a sort of PDA, with a main normal keyboard. The CyKey is currently sold by Chris Rainey, co-inventor of the Microwriter, but is just an ambidextruous chord keyboard (3 + 3 + 3 keys) you connect to a PC or a PDA, without any autonomous functions.

See also

• Chorded keyboard

External links

• The Old Computers entry for the Microwriter
• The Quinkey]

• Word processors
• Portable devices