The Smith Corona Personal Word Processor laptop

I might have written a similar post before, but this herein offers ideas as to why I keep revisiting this device.

Once as a kid, I saw an advert for the subject matter in the Smithsonian Magazine, which mag was once handed to a relative of mine. As I finally got my hands on the journal, a page in it was dedicated to this beautiful advertisement for that machine.

Here's a separate picture of the beauty available on Flickr.

Now, the Personal Word Processor (PWP) is from ca. 1989, or 28 or so years ago as of this posting.

For its time, the device's industrial design was gorgeous, so it captured my imagination, and was thus etched into my mind. Note, that the breadth of my knowledge of computer tech back then was still somewhat limited.

What confused me even then, was this: Why would one build a dedicated word processor instead of a computer that could do that and more?

A quarter century later, I learned, that it was intentionally built as a rather limited machine, and so it lacked the kind of functionality that would have made it reasonably future-proof.

My best guess is, that the project might have taken quite a long while in the product development pipeline, and was maybe even late to market, as full-fledged notebook computers as we know them now, were just around the corner.

One possible cause for PWP's probable simmering in the pipeline may have been the small screen, for which software had to be custom-made. And that always takes time.

Whereas a full-fledged PC-compatible notebook akin to Compaq LTE and just with DOS, would have enormously reduced the time-to-market — DOS ran WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, WordStar, and lots more; people trained on these would have taken very little effort to migrate. Ironically, Compaq LTE was released the same year.

Compared to PWP, Compaq LTE had a bigger and standard-sized screen, a hard drive, a standard diskette drive (PWP's Data Disk was non-standard), had some standard expansion ports, a modem, and included DOS.

Smith-Corona could have built one such general-purpose notebook computer (or even a series of those), and priced it competitively, but didn't.

So, in that same year of 1989, Compaq LTE was released, and completely changed the portables market.

In 1988 (then a year earlier), NEC UltraLite was introduced. The new and reasonably innovative thing about it was the familiar laptop form-factor in consumer space, but it notably lacked a hard drive, and was deathly expensive. (GRID Compass was the first one to have a clamshell design, but it was used in space and aeronautics.)

Smith-Corona could have provided the machine with their simple-to-use software layer anyway, which could have been made to auto-start at power-up. — And marketed it like they did, as a dedicated word processor that could double as a low-end computer.

Computer-literate people could have used a switch, a function, or a key combination to use advanced computer functions, and computer-illiterate people could have used it as a simple word processor and spreadsheet machine.

Nowadays, when compared to full-fledged computers of the time, the Smith-Corona Personal Word Processor feels like a feature phone to today's smartphones.

A cheap Android tablet almost feels the same or like a (limited) home computer of the 1980s, compared to a tablet PC with Windows or Linux.