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Revision as of 04:01, 19 January 2006 by SteveBaker (talk | contribs)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)The Microwriter is a hand-held portable word processor sold in the early 1980's.
Comprising a six-button chording keyboard a single line LCD display, an 8 bit microprocessor and a small amount of RAM, this device was capable of allowing the user to enter and edit several pages of text - and by connecting a printer to a parallel port connector, documents could also be printed.
The keyboard was of a highly innovative design with 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.
This unusual keyboard was suprisingly easy to use - most people could learn to use it with just a couple of hours use - and with a little practice, it was easy 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.
There was also an optional extra unit that would allow one to connect the Microwriter to a television and thus to perform full-screen editing.