Sharp Font Writer FW 600 Vintage 1984 Word Processor with Printer

In late 2022, I acquired the Sharp FW-600 Font Writer – a vintage word processor with a built-in printer, originally manufactured in 1984. The unit was in good condition and apparently had barely been used. Notwithstanding some scratches on the case, the unit looked just like the day it left the factory:

This is the photo of the entire set showing the LCD and the keyboard (the printer is behind the LCD and not shown);

This is the photo of the built-in printer:

Photo of the bottom of the unit, showing the carrying handle:

And the side, showing the floppy drive and the paper feed handle for the printer. This printer works fine on both continuous and A4 paper:

This is the back of the unit where the power cable goes in. My unit accepts 220VAC – I believe the empty inner space is reserved for a battery:

The device could power on just fine and the LCD was perfectly legible, showing the Self-Demonstration wizard in the following photo:

I did not have the time to play with the device back then and decided to put it in my store room where it remained forgotten for another 3 years. Recently with some free time, I powered the unit on again, only to discover that the LCD backlight is dead. The unit still remains functional, except that the LCD will not be legible without a bright light source (such as a bright lamp or your phone’s flashlight, if aimed at the correct direction). Here is a photo of the home screen, showing various applications such as Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Address Book, Utility, Label Printing and Self Demonstration:

I believe the LCD backlight issue was merely due to a bad resistor on the contrast knob, which had been acting weird when I first got the device. When I have more free time, I will disassemble the unit and fix the backlight issue.

This is the Word Processor application, which is what the FW-600 was built for. It has option for basic formatting, font adjustment, print preview, and a spell checker:

The Open menu leads to a File Open dialog, showing all documents on the floppy disk which has always been inserted in the floppy drive, and is still working after almost 40 years. The dialog shows the disk volume label (which is blank) and also the free space (437,248 bytes):

The floppy disk looks ancient but still works well, both on the FW-600 drive and on my 1.44MB USB floppy drive:

Assuming that the files on the disk were in fact created by this unit, the timestamps on the various .WP files (created by the Word Processor application) stored on the disk indicate that the unit was last used in 2010, and was only used occasionally between 2000 – 2009. It was used quite a few times between 1992 – 1998. Interestingly, any files on the disk which were created prior to the year 2000 did not have a timestamp associated with it. On these files, the date column will be empty in the FW-600 file list, and will show as 1980 when viewed from Windows. The disk is full of personal letters/correspondences dated back to the 1990s (judging from the content), allowing me to estimate when these files were created.

The Word Processor also has an option for Thesaurus which can be very useful for writing, especially in the lack of an Internet connection, available from the Spell menu. Below is a photo of the Thesaurus menu when executed from the Spreadsheet application:

The standard set of menus (File, Edit, Font, Format, Search, Spell, Other) is available to both the Word Processor and the Spreadsheet applications, making it more convenient for users to work on documents and spreadsheets. A similar set of menu can also be seen from the Label Printing application, which I assume allows user to print labels using the built in printer:

This is the self-demonstration screen, which would launch the various built-in applications, send predefined key strokes to type some text and demonstrate how the various features including spellcheck and printing work. Unfortunately this feature will read the disk drive, looking for a particular file and will simply report “File Not Found” if the required file cannot be located:

This is the Utilities applications, with options to copy and rename files on the floppy disk:

There is also an option to load and save custom dictionaries, for spell checking and thesaurus:

Opening a directory from the Utilities app requires selecting “Read Directory”  from the Disk menu. On the same menu you can also find an option to format diskettes:

There are also options to save the system setup onto the floppy disk, to be imported to another FW-600 machine:

The .WP file format created by this word processor is nothing special, at least for a basic text document. The header starts with 0xFF, followed by “CFWS-175FW-600 SHARP FontWriter2″ and then by a bunch of zero followed by what I believe is the device version information. There is then a bunch 0x00 separators before the actual text contents begin:

This is the .WP document which describes the recipe for Polka Dot Cake, when viewed with Notepad++:

To convert a normal text document to the .WP format, just replace the text contents (the readable part after the header) of an existing .WP file with your text file, noting that the FW-600 uses 0xD (and not 0xA) as line separator.

The following video demonstrates how my FW-600 prints a document from the Word Processor application:

As I had used 0xA for the line break, my sample text (copied from Norton Command’s README.TXT) was printed as a single line. The video also shows that the ribbon still works and produces legible text, although characters appear faded at times. Still, the output results are not too bad for a 40-year old device:

I could not find the service manual for this unit anywhere online. I did find some old discussion mentioning that the processor could be Z80. The user guide for the FW-750, FW-620 and FW-560 is available from archive.org. A copy of the guide can also be downloaded here.

See also
Brother Super PowerNote PN-8500MDSe vintage word processor
Casio PB-700 and FA-11 Printer & Tape Recorder