David Given Brings "CP/Mish," the Open Source CP/M Distribution, to a Brother Word Processor
Despite being designed for office work on the go, the Brother Super PowerNote is a fully-fledged Z80 microcomputer — now with a CP/M distro.
Vintage computing enthusiast David Given has brought his "CP/Mish" operating system — "an open source sort-of-CP/M distribution for the [Intel] 8080 and [Zilog] Z80 architectures" — to a new and perhaps surprising device: an old word-processor.
"This is a Brother Super PowerNote," Given explains of the device, a word processor released in the mid-1990s. "It is a deeply weird device and I've been looking for one for a long time. It's one of Brother's line of weird word processors, except in a laptop form factor. So this is not a PC. Despite that fact, it is actually a full sized laptop."
Since almost entirely supplanted by multi-functional laptops, portable word processors were once a popular alternative to electric typewriters and, typically, offered a simpler user interface at a lower cost when compared to general-purpose laptops of the era. The technology within them, though, was often the same as that of microcomputers of the 1980s — and in the case of the Brother Super PowerNote, that means an eight-bit Zilog Z80 processor.
That's exactly the target chip for which Given created CP/Mish, based on Digital's CP/M operating system. While created with microcomputer in mind, there's no real reason why it couldn't also run on a Z80-based word processor — which is what Given has now proven, by porting the software to the gadget, after a little reverse-engineering.
"If you have a Super PowerNote, please give this a try," Given says. "You build the thing and then you dd or RAW write the image onto the [floppy] disk, and then it just works. This would be an excellent system for doing things like playing the Infocom [interactive fiction] games on, if you like the noise of the disk access between moves."
The source code for CP/Mish is available on Given's GitHub repository under a mixture of open source licenses; it is also compatible with a range of other Z80-based systems including the Amstrad NC200, a selection of Brother electronic typewriters, and the classic Kaypro II microcomputer.