[the_only_law]

A few years ago I was looking at purchasing an IBM DisplayWriter from someone. I had a handful of devices with 5.25” drives but have never an 8” drive in person until then.

Unfortunately the machine was not in a working state. There was some suspicion that it was a simple issue, but I’m not an EE and I try to make sure my retro equipment works prior to buying it. Since the system wouldn’t boot, I was unsure whether the drives were even working. I ended up not buying it in part because of this and in part because I was moving soon, but I kinda regret not doing so, seeing how rare full DsiplayWriter systems are and how much a complete system will sell for (a lot more than I was going to pay for it).

At the time I had done a small amount of research on using the disk drives with a PC. I was mostly inconclusive with me finding maybe one person selling boards to adapt 8” drives. So it’s cool to see something like this now.

[zabzonk]

Not many people seem to know that there was a software version of DisplayWriter on the original IBM PC. I know this because IBM were desperate to get into the education market in the UK in the early 1980s and I was at the time working at Middlesex Polytechnic (in the UK, university now) and they gave us a PC and the software - and it was laughably crap. I was a WordStar user at the time, and I couldn't believe how inept DisplayWriter it was - and I was a big fan of VM/CMS they sold us and the 4381 super-minis that it ran on.

DisplayWriter was deeply, deeply pants.