Desperately Seeking a Brother WP-500
March 9th, 2009 by Editor BBack in the late ’80s I bought a dedicated word processor. My main criterion at the time was something that seems silly now: I wanted printed output that would be indistinguishable from a typewriter. So I got a Brother WP-500, which featured a daisywheel printer. This enabled me to produce documents that appeared to have been typed the old-fashioned way, but in reality all my documents were saved to 3.5″ disks.
Besides writing papers for college, I wanted to be able to send letters that would seem to be hand-typed, so that I could emulate Bruce West, author of Outrageously Yours. And indeed I got some good pranks out of this machine. But now it appears the joke’s on me.
After years of lugging that old machine from one residence to the next, in Bloomington and then New Orleans, much to the chagrin of my long-suffering wife, it finally met its end in 2005, when the federal levees failed and the lower level of our house was submerged in several feet of brackish water. Unfortunately that sort of thing tends to have a negative impact on electronic equipment.
I still have the 3.5″ disks with several years of writing stored on them. And that’s where this little tale of woe gets ugly. It seems that Brother used its own proprietary format on these disks. (Apparently this is the case for all of Brother’s models marketed in the United States that have the WP prefix but no suffix, that is, with no letters after the model number.) Although these are standard low-density diskettes with a 720 KB capacity, Brother’s perverted little format only uses 240 KB per disk, which makes no sense at all to me, but there it is.
The upshot is this. I can’t get the data off the disks. They can’t be read by DOS machines or anything on a typical modern desktop. I thought I could just use a more modern Brother to convert them to RTF or some sort of readable file format, but turns out that’s not possible either. Most data conversion companies can’t handle this format. The few that do are prohibitively expensive. $40 a disk is a bit much for me, since I have 20 disks.
It would be cool if I could get my hands on an old Brother WP-500. Then I could at least print these documents out and scan them for optical character recognition. Trouble is, such machines are hard to find. So I’m posting up here as a way of getting started on the search. I don’t necessarily even need to buy one. I’d be happy to beg, borrow or steal — or rent, at a reasonable price. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be a WP-500. I think some of the other older models may be compatible. Problem is, I’m not for sure which models those might be.
So — any tips on finding vintage word processors?
Postscript: One may well wonder why I’m troubling over these old files that I’ve obviously been able to live without for so long. Well. Katrina acted as a giant filter on my life. I lost many old documents, making what I’ve still got all the more precious to me.
Post postscript: It seems I’m not the only one in the Crescent City singing the data recovery blues.
March 9th, 2009 at 11:25 am
Any chance you can pull a disk image and make it available for reverse-engineering, or do modern floppy drives not even recognize that there’s anything to read?
March 9th, 2009 at 11:37 am
Yeah, I wish. I think all DOS can do is reformat the disk. But I will double check this.
March 9th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
Would this be compatible?
http://cgi.ebay.com/BROTHER-WP-75-Word-Processor-Electric-Typewriter-WORKS_W0QQitemZ200316771442QQcmdZViewItemQQptZBI_Typewriters_Word_Processors?hash=item200316771442&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=72%3A1205|66%3A2|65%3A12|39%3A1|240%3A1318|301%3A0|293%3A1|294%3A50
March 9th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
Tony – maybe! I despair of finding any documentation to that end but this looks promising. Thanx.
March 9th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
This is a huge longshot, but are there any virtual machine images of a compatible Brother OS? Then, I imagine all you’d need is a disk drive that reads those 240K disks.
March 9th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
I have a similar situation. I still have the machine, but the problem is finding INK to print everything out on. Let me see if I can find my machine…I’m not sure if it was a Brother or not.
March 9th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
I used to have one of those! Well, I’m not sure if I had the exact same version (I got it in 1990), but it was the same basic setup. Alas, I gave it away to some kids a decade later. A friend of my had one though–he lives in Virginia and hasn’t faced any floods, so I’ll ask if he still has his …
March 9th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
I have a Brother WP 700D that you may have for free if it will do the job. AFAIK it works OK and has very little use on it. Drop me an email if you are interested.
March 9th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
I very well may have one. It’s in my mother’s closet, and I’ll be there this weekend. You see my e-mail address even tho it’s not posted, right? E-mail me and we’ll figure something out.
March 9th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
I was searching for an image of the brother wp-500 to confirm that that was indeed my model, and I found this, which may or may not be helpful:
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=50632
March 9th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
I have one for you—email me….
March 9th, 2009 at 7:03 pm
My friend no longer has his–but it’s looking promising in the other comments … good luck.
March 9th, 2009 at 8:16 pm
I called Brother this afternoon and they told me the only compatible models are the WP-500, WP-550 and WP-610. Only those three from the hundreds of models they’ve manufactured. Sucks.
But Scott at Pivar Computing Services in Illinois said he’d give me a decent rate if I send him ten or more disks. They actually reverse-engineered the Brother formats twenty years ago and are probably closing shop soon. So if I don’t find one of the above-cited models soon I’ll scrape together the bucks for that. It will save me the print/scan/OCR hassle.
March 9th, 2009 at 10:48 pm
I am reasonably certain that dos can read this kind of floppy, but not positive – wordperfect 5.1 used to be able to read a myriad of word processor formats and half the girls’ dorm used to print/edit their papers in my room in high school. Friend of mine had one that I could open her files.
Also, Linux or any unix for that matter can just read the straight bytes off the floppy into an image, and these formats are generally all wrapped ascii of some sort – probably not that hard once you get down to it. (I say this as I am studying for a test in reverse engineering – assembly language and old viruses!)
March 10th, 2009 at 12:50 am
I am having the same issue with an old Amstrad wp that used something called locoscript and very proprietary 3 inch discs. The drive went dead and I haven’t had the time to crack it open and see if I can replace it with a rubberband. It has everything I wrote for about 5 years in the late 80s-early 90s. I’m either going to have to fix it all and scan it all back… or find a way to convert the output to serial and just convert up and up and up.
Wish i could help you with your issue.
March 10th, 2009 at 11:45 am
Oops, I got the model numbers wrong above. It’s the WP-500, the WP-510 and the WP-650 that are compatible.
Also, Candice, I am not very optimistic about DOS or Linux being able to read these disks. Check out this discussion on comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage. Here’s the relevant poop:
And this sort of jibes with my other research. Most companies that offer data conversion for Brother won’t do my type of disk. This is their bread and butter, so I can only assume if it was halfway easy they’d do it.
One thing’s clear. Proprietary formats suck! But we knew that already.
March 10th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
That’s complete madness about the disk controllers. That seems like it would be prohibitively expensive to manufacture – Brother would have been paying many times the cost of a normal disk drive to have the hardware work “wrong.”
Linux is pretty forgiving with just straight bytes and no filesystems – if it is that kind – dd even accepts sector size as an argument – like on tapes – you’d still have to reconstruct the files because the organization of it would be an issue. In theory you could get all the text back, but not what parts go with what without knowing the disk filesystem format.
March 10th, 2009 at 2:21 pm
http://www.file-convert.com/wpt_ff.htm
May do it, there is a free trial download
March 10th, 2009 at 6:04 pm
Shoot one of those disks my way B! If I can’t crack it, I’ve got a friend who lives for this sort of thing.
March 14th, 2009 at 11:26 am
Booooo. I just checked out my old Brother that was living in my mother’s closet, and it’s the wrong model. I WP2200 to be exact.
I hope you can find a solution!
April 6th, 2009 at 2:21 pm
Something on Ebay – Brother WP-500 Word Processor Electronic Typewriter
FWIW
April 10th, 2009 at 10:22 am
[...] those Brother WP-500 disks I mentioned a while back? I was unable to find a compatible machine to actually read and print the [...]
May 21st, 2009 at 5:35 pm
I have a Brother Word Processer 500 for sale. It uses an MFD60 disc. I haven’t used it for a while, but I turned it on and typed a little and it appears to be in fine working order. Are you still interested in this model? I am a private individual, not a store or refurbisher. Carole
May 21st, 2009 at 6:39 pm
Carole: Thanks so much for taking the time to contact me. Alas, you come too late — I paid a data conversion company to recover the files. Thanks anyway
June 3rd, 2009 at 3:40 pm
I have one, too, if anyone wants it!!! It’s not for sale either, it’s free!
August 19th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
I have been using my Brother WP500 regularly since I bought it about 1985. It was a marvelous machine. It burned when my house was completely destroyed on June 6, 2009. Also, all discs and tapes burned completely when my whole house burned down in a very hot fire. My beloved black LABRADOR was killed by the smoke.
I’m sorry, for you could have run your discs on my machine. I desperately want another one if one can be located. For anyone who needs to know, the tapes can be purchased at Office Depot and the discs can be ordered from Brother. Brother has not made the machines for years. Thanks for your help. Rosemarie
August 19th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Please notify me by email if you have a Brother WP 500. Mine burned in a horrible fire. Thank you.
August 19th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
Please contact me by email: clampitt4senate@yahoo.com if you have a Brother WP 500. Thank you. Rosemarie
October 27th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
I got my Brother WP 500 in 1988 and stored many family stories on the 3.5″ floppies. Today I retrieved it from the closet to print them out and discovered the disk drive won’t read the floppies anymore. Any Solutions?
December 15th, 2009 at 11:11 pm
To Reece;
I’m sure it hums away without doing a thing? If so, I have a new floppy which is the answer. Mine burned a circuit board. Will trade shipping, labor, ink, time and postage to print out your old disks if you are willing to part with the base machine which has a good board and screen. Write me back. I can repair yours and poetry that my disks have held hostage for several years.
January 11th, 2010 at 2:00 am
HI!
I found one at a flea market and have not tried it extensively. It does power up and show the words you type on screen. Beyond that, i don’t know. Interested?
Sincerely,
Fredd
January 11th, 2010 at 10:45 am
Fredd: Thanks so much for taking the time to contact me. Alas, you come too late — I paid a data conversion company to recover the files. Thanks anyway.
January 31st, 2010 at 7:04 pm
Hey, i have one of those machines i actually want to get rid of. message me if its still any interest to you at darrgend@hotmail.com
February 6th, 2010 at 1:27 pm
Does anybody know where there’s a Brother WP 55 for sale cheap?
Maybe free to loving home?
Editor B, I have some friends who are REALLY good at data conversion. I’m going to have to depend on their help, as I now need a digitial version of my MA thesis. The only printed copy I have is bound, and the disks are all 3.5. Some of this particular thesis was done on a WP55, and some was done on a Brother 3900 DS, which is DOS compatible.
We moved to Mississippi, where I got a full-time position teaching college, from Florida. My husband left both my WP 55 and my 3900 DS in a garage near Orlando.
If I were to try paying someone for data conversion, I’d be in trouble, as I’m a writer, and I have hundreds of 3.5 disks.
When (hopefully not “if”) I get my thesis disks converted, I’ll let you know how it was done.
Capt Rat
February 7th, 2010 at 11:30 am
I have a WP 510 with accessory kit. works perfectly. Heavy to ship though.
February 7th, 2010 at 9:03 pm
I don’t think any other Brother WP can “speak” to a WP 55. Talk about a dysunctional family of “brothers!”
The 55 is really simple, but it’s a real workhorse of a word processor. I’ve found most of the disks I need, and I’m going to get a friend who’s really computer language savvy to help me.
Thanks.