Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 21, 1993 TAG: 9311190066
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PHILLIP ROBINSON Knight-Ridder Newspapers
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
These do more than electric typewriters, less than personal computers. They handle text and have their own printer built in. Although they get little press attention, you'll find them in all sorts of stores, from consumer electronics outlets to warehouse stores and department stores. Brother, Smith-Corona, and Canon are the big names in PWPs.
Electronic typewriters can cost as little as $90 and offer you such features as automatic centering, return, boldface and underlining, decimal tabs, indenting, word-erasing, easy subscripts and superscripts, and - this is the big feature in advertising - spelling checkers.
Personal word processors that cost $200 to $500 can do all those same things. Most have a "typewriter mode" where you just roll in a piece of paper and starting typing - and each letter appears on paper as you press its key. But PWPs can also operate in word-processor mode, where the keys you press are stored in memory and displayed on a small LCD screen. In this mode, the text is not immediately transferred to paper, instead it is sent later to a daisy-wheel (which hammers each letter onto the page - a slow but high-resolution way to print text) or bubble-jet (more like today's computer inkjet printers, and so it is more flexible at printing a variety of text fonts or even some graphics). Because they're in memory, you can use other features on them, such as search and replace, block operations (copy, moving, or deleting a large section of text at a time), headers and footers, word wrap, thesaurus search and formatting. Most PWPs offer menus of those commands, which look a lot like Mac or Windows programs but without the graphics. The more expensive PWPs even have a floppy drive to store yet more.
You'll be surprised by how similar the software is in the various word processors. You may also be surprised that they're not much easier to learn than computers - though you only have the one program to learn.
Also, don't expect much upgradability or compatibility from your PWP. Some will advertise they can become computer printers, with the right cable and software. Don't believe that until someone demonstrates it for you with your own computer and programs.
Brother's WP680 ($200, (800) 284-4357) is the first step above a mere typewriter and a good example of what a PWP provides. The Brother WP2200 ($400) is a typical top-dollar PWP that adds a floppy-disk drive, more than twice the memory, and a much larger screen to the same basic software in the 680.
The Smith-Corona PWP 365 ($320, (800) 448-1018) has all the editing basics, a floppy disk drive, 64K of memory, a 16-line by 80-character screen, and both a 75,000 word spelling dictionary and a 96,000 word thesaurus. It also has a "grammar checking" option, though I found this difficult to figure out and use. The Smith-Corona PWP 3850 ($400) has a separate screen that sticks to the PC EGA standard - typical in older business-class PCs. Like the more expensive Brother systems, this even offers a spreadsheet option for crunching numbers.
The Canon Starwriter 70 ($400, (800) 432-1467) has the same suite of editing commands as other PWPs along with a built-in screen that is brighter and clearer than most. The Starwriter is unique because it doesn't use a daisy-wheel to print as the other PWPs do, instead using a bubble-jet (that shoots tiny drops of ink at the page). Its pages can look much more like computer-generated stuff. The built-in floppy drive comes with a program to convert Starwriter files to plaintext (ASCII) DOS files.
I didn't take PWPs seriously until friends asked what computer they should buy to get started. Some just wanted something on which to write papers for school or for word processing at home, something that wouldn't be too hard to learn and wouldn't be obsolete within months. For them, to my own surprise, the best deal is a personal word processor. And it costs only a little more than the sales tax on a full new computer system.
by CNB