Brother LW-35 Typewriter Modernization | | Saturday, June 6th 2020, 18:06 |
-- Now that's my definition of building a computer!
Do you still remember the old electronic typewriters from the nineties? Many of the later machines were already pretty much full-fledged computers, just with a word processor as the operating system. One of these typewriters is the Brother LW-35 released in Europe. I still had one of these lying around; Great keyboard, a fun daisy wheel printer, and a 14 line display for distraction free writing. It even had a floppy drive for data exchange. So in summary, a pretty cool device.
But there were a few problems with it. First of all, the floppy drive stopped working reliably. And secondly, on the days the floppy drive decided to work, it was still a floppy drive. Not exactly the most convenient way to store and transfer data these days, although I'm sure some of you will disagree. Also, the typewriter used its own file format, which needed to be converted on the device itself before it could be read in a DOS or UNIX environment. This may be OK if you're writing a longer document, and only write it on that machine. But as someone who constantly changes the machine they type on, it's not practical.
Yet, even with these problems, I just didn't have the heart to throw it out.
So what can we do about it? Upgrade it!
In this post, I will show you how I converted my old LW-35 typewriter into a modern computer while keeping all the good features of the old machine.
