#electronic typewriter

This is a Sharp PA-1020 electronic typewriter, one of the last series before PC‘s officially replaced typewriters in general, like it was from the late 80‘s to the mid 90‘s.

It works with unrecharchable batteries (4x D), and it already hat lots of functions you possibly wouldn’t expect of something that’s still called a „typewriter“.

So you can change the font and it saves up to 6500 signs , with an external RAM-card up to 99 Pages, before you have to print them. You also have the possibility to add a „Spelling-Module“ for auto correction and it is has a calculator function too.

I can‘t mention everything, but here‘s the link to the user manual of the PA 1050, which works basically the same:

so recently my old brother electronic typewriter/word processor got dug up. i got this originally at a yard sale at a church when i was in high school long after it was out of date, and had to carefully drag it home on my bike!

first time testing it with actual paper and i fucked it up by accidentally locking the roller in place so the first few lines overprinted themselves and it was crooked - after that i tried again and things went fine. then i went ahead and fucked about trying to fill up a page typing stuff in, starting with going through the three keyboard modes to try to grab all the characters it can print, then fucking around with formatting and letter pitch settings.

for some reason i can’t get it to successfully format any of my old 3.5 inch double density disks even though it’s supposed to use them, albeit in its custom 240 kilobyte format which is really weird and like, 1/3 the data such disks should be holding. so that basically means reading disks from this either requires one of the other brother printers that use the same format or very careful messing around with certain older PC diskette drives and custom software.

i used to have disks in its format around somewhere with stuff on them, but i have no earthly idea where i’d put them. pretty sure i wrote some fanfic or otherwise weird sex stories on that late late at night in high school kinda fucked up sleep meds???? anyway really the coolest thing about this is the ink ribbon still works after probably like a decade since last touched? ofc at least once it got past the initial bit of dried up ribbon that had been exposed all this time.

my three test sheets done with the Brother WP-760D