【Toshiba】 Rupo JW98UP

Toshiba began selling the Rupo JW98UP in 1991, a personal word processor with the same spreadsheet processing and advanced word processing capability as a computer because it came standard with Lotus 1-2-3 R2.2J, an integrated spreadsheet program. Lotus 1-2-3 was the most popular software title running on MS-DOS, which at the time was the most installed computer operating system in Japan. To counteract the eroding market for word processors caused by steadily improving word processing software for computers, dedicated word processing machines had to offer the leading software titles found on computers. The Rupo JW98UP was Toshiba’s first word processor to come with Lotus 1-2-3.

The Lotus 1-2-3 program was supplied on floppy disks. The JW98UP featured a dedicated key for powering up the unit and a numeric keypad for fast input of numbers.

A special function was included to convert between Lotus 1-2-3 data and Rupo documents and vice versa. This meant Lotus 1-2-3 data could be converted, laid out, and edited in a Rupo document and entire or parts of Rupo documents could be converted into Lotus 1-2-3 data. In this way, users could freely combine data entered in Rupo and Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets.

JW89UP users could create and edit documents as long as 48,000 characters, which was three times longer than previous models. The backlit white LCD screen was also easier to read because it was 20 percent larger than previous models.