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IBM DisplayWriter?

inakito

inakito

Experienced Member
Joined
Oct 5, 2011
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Spain
Recently I have found an IBM DisplayWriter, without any software, just the hardware parts: cpu, monitor, printer and floppy drive.
I understand this machine was intended to be used as a electronic typewriter.
But, was it used for anything else ?
 
Great find! The x86 system from IBM that preceded the 5150. You can get UCSD Pascal as well as CP/M 86 for it. Several DWs could link to a common storage/printing system. The keyboard is to die for.

A lot of the printing smarts are in the (EBCIDIC) printer--it's very different from the usual situation of a dumb printer and smart computer.
 
those are beautiful machines.. i hope to find one some day. - congratulations.
can you please post a bunch of pics of the cable ends, backside of the devices, and inside of the printer?
 
FWIW here is everything I have on the IBM Displaywriter. Single .zip file (168 MB). Most of the images contained within are mine, but the pdf's I acquired elsewhere. Can't recall the source at the moment. Bitsavers perhaps?

Anyway, hope this helps.
 
I had a Displaywriter for many years but traded it a few years ago.

Every year, I would pull it out of storage and run it. I would then discover that my memory was not as good as I thought it was. Consequently, I ended up creating the document [here].
 
Thanks for your help. TomFCS I have been unable to download your file; it starts downloading and then breaks after some Kbytes.
modem7, thanks for the document. I think it will be very useful to me! :-)
 
I've been developing a sort-of-FAQ and catalogue of hardware, software and manuals here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc


I now have Modem7's original Displaywriter having passed through an interim collector, AllanG, on its way to me, now one of my favourite systems.

I also have a project to reverse engineer the DW but I have not made much progress recently due to an unexpected house-move. I hope to return to this project in the next few months, and I now have an arsenal of logic analysers to probe into the workings of the DW.

We know that at least one copy of UCSD p-System appeared on eBay a couple of years ago, but our efforts to contact the seller/buyer to find out where it went did not produce results.

We've never seen CP/M-86 for the Displaywriter, or heard of anyone having it. I did try to correspond with the developers of a text-editor that targeted CP/M-86 on Displaywriter but they never replied to my enquiries. I corresponded with another programmer who was working on a port of MS-DOS to Displaywriter however that project was cancelled and no product was released.

One piece of hardware I would like to find and explore is the so-called 66-line display monitor ("Display Station"). I have this wild-theory that a suitable high bandwidth monitor connected to the Displaywriter video plug and grounding the correct pin (as per the manual) it would automatically switch to 66-line mode.

I've only found one academic research paper on the history of the dedicated word-processor, given their importance and ubiquity in the 1970s and 1980s it is an area ripe for further investigation and description.

I urge everyone to get their diskettes imaged so we can add to the library of DW software. My plan with the reverse-engineered DW is that we can build an emulator for this system and everyone can experience the system more easily. It would be possible to connect the DW keyboard to the emulator and get a more genuine experience. An emulator for the DW would be quite straightforward given that it used so many standard Intel peripheral support chips.

One picture of a deployed IBM DW is this one, taken at Intel, it shows they needed considerable desk real-estate.
 
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