【Toshiba】 Rupo JW04N

Toshiba launched the Rupo JW04N in July 1993 as a lightweight A4-sized notebook word processor aimed for use on the road. Besides its compact size, Toshiba engineered the JW04N to run on NiMH batteries or regular dry cells and furnished it with a card-based modem for communications and a portable thermal transfer personal printer to make it suitable for road use.

With a 297 x 210 x 39.5 millimeter form factor — exactly the same size as an A4 sheet, the JW04N was 20 percent smaller than its predecessors, and weighing just 1.8 kilograms, it was 30 percent lighter. For greater mobility, it could run on a NiMH battery pack (seven hours of operating time) or alkaline dry cells (six AA batteries) as well as on regular AC power. The IC card slot allowed a 2400 bps card modem to fit perfectly in the unit. The modem enabled users to send and receive documents between word processors and to access searchable commercial database services offering newspaper and magazine articles and corporate data.

Toshiba also boosted the JW04N’s word processing features. A number of innovations were made to raise the input efficiency, including neuro-learning, which learned word pairs as AI candidate words, a corporate name dictionary with more than 1,900 company names, and a method for converting entries into katakana for katakana words not listed in the dictionary. The JW04N could also display vertical text, which made it easier to visualize the format of vertical text documents while editing.