The Brother WP-1 word processor from 1985
Channel: Poking Technology
Date: 05/03/2022

In whch yr hmbl svt tears down, explores, and mends an old Brother WP-1 word processing appliance from 1985.

This thing is a gorgeous piece of 1980s technology with a cool amber letterbox CRT, daisy-wheel printer, Z80 processor with 64kB of RAM, and weird-arse 120kB floppy drive. Unlike its later cousins the board has a serial port and expansion connector making it a highly capable Z80 SBC, suitable for hacking. The keyboard is superb, one of the best rubberdomes I've ever seen and better than many mechanical keyboards, and the modern-ish layout makes it far too good not to use.

In this video I explore the works a bit and check out the various PCB outputs. I think it wouldn't be hard to adapt non-destructively to be a serial terminal for a more modern computer like a Raspberry Pi. Sadly the 120kB disk is rather limiting for running software _from_ floppy, so I don't think I'l be getting CP/M on this.

The ROM images are here: https://github.com/davidgiven/brother-wp-software/tree/dtrg-lw30/WP-1
FluxEngine Brother 120kB format support is here: https://cowlark.com/fluxengine/doc/disk-brother.html