It is hard to describe the Brother SuperPowerNote. It looks like a big old Z80-based laptop, but it says it is a notebook. The label on it says (with lots of exclamation marks) that it is a word processor, a communications system, a personal scheduler, and a spreadsheet organizer. Brother also promises on the label that it will “Increase your power to perform on the job, on the road or at home!” Plenty of exclamation marks to go around. The label also touts DOS or Windows, but [Poking Technology] didn’t want that. He wanted CP/M. See how he did it in the video below.
This is a very early laptop-style word processor with a floppy and a strange-looking screen. It also had serial and parallel ports, odd for a word processor, and probably justified the “communication system” claim on the label.
The device looked practically unused and came up immediately without the main battery and a replacement coin cell. The LCD was decidedly not like a modern LCD. It reminded us of a giant Sharp Zaurus. Want to see the insides? Jump to around the 24-minute mark.
The circuit board inside is fairly small, with a lot of empty space and some unpopulated components. Inside is a Z180, along with some memory chips. There’s also a very common floppy disk controller. While it would be possible to replace the ROM chip, it would be a pain, so instead, he dug through an executable file. That way, he was able to figure out how to load software.
Then, it was a matter of understanding the hardware with a logic probe and oscilloscope. Once the hardware gave up its secrets, it was easy enough to port CP/M. The extra 64K of memory available is now a disk cache, so the performance looks pretty good.
True, you probably aren’t going to get one of these venerable machines and run CP/M on it yourself. But the process is fascinating to watch, and we do love peeking inside this old hardware. Compared to a modern OS, CP/M is fairly easy to bootstrap on a new system, even if it is an ESP32. We’ve even seen CP/M taught to use an Arduino from a Z80.
The label only claims Windows or DOS file compatibility, not OS support.
Pretty cool video, thanks for the story!
It’s a great hacking video actually! Very interesting to see him walk through the decompiled code and piece things together.
Serial and Parallel were common on these devices as once you’d typed your document – you either needed to print it or get it out to another computer.
Printers back then could be either parallel or serial – so you could print to either type if you had both. (Very useful if you needed to print on other people’s printers)
Some of these devices (particularly the older Tandy Model 100) were popular with journalists who’d file copy they’d typed back to their newsroom via a Modem/Acoustic Coupler (from a payphone quite often) rather than having to dictate it down the phone to a copy-taker in the newsroom.
There was also a use-case where you’d use this on the road, and then dump your typed file to a DOS PC at home via Serial.
So Serial and Parallel did make a lot of sense for a portable word processor back in the day.
That’s ideal for running MP/M or MP/M II, too!
MP/M can do use more than 64 KB of RAM and use various serial terminals simultaneously.
CP/Net is also interesting, if the device has network connectivity of some sorts.
The cool thing is, that all these OSes can run CP/M 2.2 programs.
MP/M… welp, there went my afternoon. :-)
Why not Microsoft’s old CP/M superset: MSX-DOS? It’s designed for larger memory than 64K. (Probably doesn’t bank the same way as this device, and it doesn’t have the same graphics & sound chips as an MSX, but that’s the fun of porting.)
Ah, I see. I heard of MSX computers before, they’re cool. Especially the MSX2 generation. I just wasn’t sure about the dependencies, if MSX-BASIC/MSX-DOS needs a certain video mode etc.
Another fascinating Z80 OS might be SymbOS, but I don’t know how much memory it needs exactly. 🤷♂️
I remember seeing things like this in a local office supply store back in the late 90s. I think the ones I saw were 386 based with color screens, but that was during a time when it was possible to get 2nd hand Pentium laptops for fairly cheap so I just kinda laughed at the Brother wordpressor ones. I still have a P90 laptop I got off of ebay for ~$100 in 1999, somewhere around here.
That’s understandable.
These devices seem like low-end PCs to us tinkerers, while they look like high-end typewriters to typists. Let’ sjust think of the Amstrad PCW (aka Schneider Joyce).
That’s why, say, the Epoc based Psion Series 5 handhelds were so beloved, I suppose.
They were poor PDAs, but excellent portable typewriters.
Writing a story or an essay while traveling was somewhat comfy compared to using a notebook of the time or a mechanical portable typewriter.
It had a big keyboard (for its size).
And the LCD screen was poor for graphics, but razor sharp for text characters.
Playing Zork or Adventure must have been a joy, too. If the lighting was alright.
Found this while googling for ebay prices:
https://hackaday.io/project/169958-brother-super-powernote-reverse-engineering
“And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head.”
– from Sir Terry Pratchett’s novel Masquerade.
“Notebook” and “Laptop” were basically interchangeable terms back in the day, with the former implying a size not much larger than an actual pad of letter-size paper or possibly a 3-ring binder, and the latter not implying so much, but otherwise identical in usage.
Then some stories came out about sperm motility being negatively impacted by the warmth of using a heat-generating device on one’s lap for hours at a time, and a number of major manufacturers suddenly stopped EVERYTHING to edit all their ad copy to refer strictly to such machines as notebooks, never implying that they’d get anywhere near a user’s lap.
business ass covering at its very best…