There was a time when the line between typewriters and word processing software was a bit fuzzy. [Poking Technology] found a Xerox 6040 which can’t decide what it is. It looks like a typewriter but has a monitor and a floppy drive, along with some extra buttons. You can watch him tear it down in the video below.
The old device uses a daisywheel type element, which, back then, was state of the art. A wheel had many spokes with letters and the printer would spin the wheel and then strike the plastic spoke.
Inside there is a computer of sorts. Like a lot of gear from those days, there is a huge linear power supply. The video is a couple of hours long, so you’ll have plenty of chances to see the inside. There is an 8031 on the first logic board and some odd connections for external devices. As it turns out, that board wasn’t the main wordprocessing board which is under the keyboard.
On that board, there is another small CPU and some very large gate arrays. Under an odd-looking socket, however, lives an 80188, which is sort of an 8086/8088 variant.
The video is a very long deep dive into the internals, including reverse engineering of some of the ROM chips and even a surprise or two.
These machines always look retro-chic to us. Even then, though, we preferred WordStar.
This articles is written by : Fady Askharoun Samy Askharoun
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