Overview

   The other day my mom forced me to go to the local Habitat for Humanity store to look at some chairs she found for our kitchen. When I was there I unearthed a beautiful W1525 word processor, which I was able to purchase for $10 because the person in charge of the store thought it was junk. When I got it home I plugged it in and turned it on and was greeted by a wonderful clicking, purring, and buzzing sound. The machine has a green CRT display, 2 backup disk drives, and a single floppy disk drive, as well as an entire electric typewriter hidden under the panel on the top. The keyboard clicks into a special storage area on the back of the machine and plugs into it using a standard telephone jack.

   At the base of the machine there is a panel that is held in place with simple phillips head screws. I took it off and found easy access to the motherboard of the machine. Some quick google searching showed me that it had 2 microprocessors, 2 rom chips, an sRAM chip, and several other miscellaneous chips. The microprocessor is an HD63B03XP, which has plenty of documentation available because of its use in the Atari ST intelligent keyboard. To me it seems that the whole system is ripe for hacking. There are several avenues that are open to get my own code to execute on the machine. The first two that are immediately apparent to me involve either direct programming of the microprocessor, or emulating the ROM chips. Either approach has difficulties, but I have confidence that I'll be able to work something out eventually.

To Do

• Learn the way the main processor works.
• Emulate the ROM chips.
• Map out the internal mechanisms.
• Figure out how to execute code on the machine.
• Add new processor to original hardware.

Timeline

Materials

Obtained?	Item	Cost
Yes	W1525 Word Processor	$10

Media

Credits

-Habitat for HumanityCheap old cool stuff. -Owen TruebloodCode-fu. -InterwebsThe knowledge.