【Toshiba】 TOSWORD JW-1

This was a compact, lightweight, inexpensive word processor for personal use, first marketed by Toshiba in November 1982. It was an all-in-one type portable machine with a price of ¥598,000 and a weight of 11.5kg. When this is compared with Japan's first word processor -- the JW-10 which was announced in 1978 -- we see that in 4 years volume had been reduced to 1/20, weight to 1/15 and price to 1/10.
The main features of the JW-1 were as follows:

(1) Portability

Greater compactness and lighter weight were achieved with a 2-line liquid crystal kanji (Chinese character) display, a compact thermal transfer printer, a double-density thin 5.25-inch FDD, a newly developed thin keyboard, 256 kilobytes mask ROM, and 64 kilobytes D-RAM.

(2) High performance

This was a compact, low-price machine, but for input it used the kana-kanji conversion system which had previously been established with high-end machines. Printing of finished documents was done via 24x24dot printing.

The JW-1 could only display 2 lines, so various innovations were incorporated to make operation easier -- such as switching the function of each line on the display to suit the intended operation by user.
Since this was a portable machine, it was likely to be used in more severe environments than previous machines, and be subject to events like sudden power failures, power supply interruption or damage to document FD. Therefore it was equipped with the following features:

• Document recovery function

If an unexpected interruption in processing occurred during document creation (for example due to a power supply interruption), this feature restored the input up to that point, as far as possible.

• Document FD forced read

If an error was discovered in input from a document FD, this function skipped the part involved in the area, and read only the normal parts of the disk, thereby minimizing the effects of the damage.