This is an old revision of this page, as edited by SteveBaker (talk | contribs) at 02:22, 20 January 2006. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
Revision as of 02:22, 20 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 by Microwriter Ltd, of London, UK.
The following is a description of the 'MW-4' Microwriter which is the only model sold in any quantities.
Comprising a six-button chording keyboard, a single line LCD display, an 8 bit microprocessor, word processing software in ROM and 16 Kbytes of RAM, this device was capable of allowing the user to enter and edit several pages of text - and by connecting a printer to the parallel port connector, documents could also be printed. The device was powered by a set of rechargable nickel-cadmium batteries and came in a faux leather case.
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 suprisingly 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.
At the top end of the unit was a Centronics parallel port and an on/off button. At the other end was a 49 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. There was also a serial port connector to allow the Microwriter to be plugged into a computer to function in place of the conventional keyboard.
Despite all of this innovation, and the fact that there was no similar product on the market, the Microwriter was not a great success. It is likely that the chording keyboard put off many potential users - which is unfortunate since once introduced to the device, most users could learn it suprisingly quickly.