Radio Shack WP-2: Eccentricities
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After spending a bit of time with my newest Tandy portable (I traded my Model 102 for a WP-2), I have a few comments to make about some of the weirder elements that it has going for it. What Radio Shack was thinking when they designed this sucker to replace the Model 10x /20x line, I honestly don't know... Well, no, wait a minute, yes I do. It's the things that I was looking for when I first started to seek one of these. I suppose I'll have to describe the choice in a little bit of detail first, then give a description of how well the WP-2 measures up to my first desires. Desired Features of the WP-2I suppose the first thing that comes to mind about the WP-2 as compared to the 102 that I previously used is the screen size. I know, this sounds really silly, but it matters. I have good eyes (with glasses, I should add), and the screen of the Model 102 was driving me nuts. I didn't WANT characters that large, I thought it wasted space, and I didn't want to deal with having to adjust my writing style to the sentences that I could view on screen. That was too short (I tend to lengthy sentences when blathering on to myself in a journal/diary type setting). Sure, I got used to the shift up and shift down combinations, but then the screen rewrite was too damn slow. And good GOD, entering text (inserting it) somewhere into the middle of a lengthy document took forEVER. How frustrating. So, I guess, I wanted that upgrade to the whopping 5.82 Mhz (or whatever it is) processor. At least, well, I was told it was faster, right? What other things was I looking for? I suppose that the ability to print more easily made a difference. Sure, this was only the choice of the correct cable (since I never bothered to get the right cable for the M102 to connect it to a printer), but there was more to it. I wanted some of the features I had found in the WP-2: highlight and bold, underline and italics, plus the ability to control the margins a bit. So, there you have it, the WP-2 was supposed to come with the following features: easier printing without first uploading to the desktops, bigger screens, and maybe some faster and easier performance. Oh, and I also had a few expectations about the abilities of the M102 that would stay with me: easy connection to a desktop for downloading, and general simplicity of use as a word processing tool (no, let's call that a text editor). I also knew that I would be losing the BASIC editor and modem, neither of which I used (though I have since received mail from people who use the M100 to access their UNIX accounts - pretty damn cool, just, well, never going to happen with me). Matching to expectations?Well, for anyone who is thinking of purchasing a WP-2, take the choice with a grain of salt. If the screen size is important, go for it. If the speed is important... you really won't find it (though there is a trick I'll explain in just a moment.). If ease of connection is important, be prepared for a few quirks. And, most important, if you just want to get your text files in easily editable format, then watch out. Details on the quirksLet me begin with the parts that actually match the expectation. Yes, the screen is nicely larger and holds far more content. That's important to me, and it's a great thing to have happen. Sure, my eyes have to actually focus on small letters, but I am happy with the screen. Chalk one up for the Tandy WP-2. Speed and Tricks for Inserting TextIs it faster? Yes, definitely. Of course, it still has the same hangup the M102 did, but there IS a workaround. The problem is this: you get into a long document (a couple of k) and you want to enter a few sentences somewhere in the middle. The machine only responds sloooooowwwlllly and since I type quickly, it loses a lot of my letters. Not what I want. The workaround in the WP-2 is pretty easy and seems to work on the fact that you're not moving every single letter in RAM forward one block (this is my mental model of the situation, I have no idea how it works in reality) as you type a new letter. The trick is to redefine how much you have to push into. On the M102, it seemed that you were going to push the contents forward, block by block and it took the machine a while to DO that. On the WP-2, I figured out a trick. Find the place where you want to enter text. At the insertion point, hit [return], move the cursor to the end of the newly created paragraph where you want to put the text, then type what you wanted; when done, just hit shift-delete (i.e.forward delete) to get rid of that [return] and the speed issue won't have played a role. The machine responds really quickly to the inserted text, and other than a return/cursor move/delete, you really haven't done anything. And it is most definitely much faster. Uploading filesLet's face it, the M102 had a really easy file transfer capability. I hit F3, typed com:x8n1e (x=5 or 8, depending on where I was uploading), and that was that. All I needed was a null modem cable. Well, the WP-2 seems to have been an attempt to make the process more honest and overseeable. The designers must have felt they were doing the right thing, but they were wrong. I mean, sure, I want to know what com:58n1e means, but it's just a character string, and it works, and to do something different, I type com:88n1e. It's fast, it works, and I can kinda know what it means (though it doesn't make sense - two very different concepts). The WP-2 is much more quirky than that. Enough so that I wrote a page about it. Go there to read more of my thoughts. As with all descriptions of computing, it's tediously verbose, but maybe you can get something out of it. To put it simply, the WP-2 is lacking in its transfer power. Like I said, read about it. Other, unexpected quirksI go into more detail when I write about file transfers, but you can't use Telcom from the Files menu. You have to be in a file. But then, you can't transfer the file that you're in. Makes no sense. Some of the keystrokes make no sense when walking through the system. In some places, F1-1 is "help" and gives you one set of options. In other places, F1-1 seems to mean "menu of possibilities." Like in a text file, F1-1 gives you a list of options for the text. But in Telcom, it's a list of options for the transfer process. I suppose in both it's a "menu of possibilities" that is tailored to your work environment of the moment, but it still feels really odd. What is this? they moved the arrow keys to the bottom of the keyboard, and my wrist keeps hitting the [up]arrow, so suddenly I've moved up one line and am typing through the middle of previous material. Silly people, what were they thinking? (actually, it makes a lot of sense, I just have big hands). The machine doesn't start off in the menu like the Model 102 did. There, I had to choose the last file I was working on, hit return, and only then could I edit. On the WP-2, I can just turn the machine on, and the cursor is where I left it. Hey, that's convenient! Random letters. Do I type too fast or something? When my fingers are flying along, the machine has this odd habit of throwing in random text. Like a "7" at the end of "ing," so that "seeing" becomes "seeing7" or "thing" becomes "thing7." Is this supposed to happen? I also get "real=ly" and another "ing" situation, "i-ng." Then there's "kno-w." What's going on here? Everything else seems normal, just those occasional oddnesses in typing. No, I am not hitting those keys, either. In my description of file transfers, I describe my workaround of this situation... Default page width is 65 characters. You have to go to F2-Layout to make the thing 80 characters wide. The 65 makes sense for printing directly from the machine (which I still haven't done, because my printers won't recognize the thing), but the 80 makes sense when working on the machine. Overall...For all the weirdness of the file transfer and random inserted letters, the WP-2 is exactly what I wanted. It has the screen, it has the form factor, it has the quieter keyboard (good for libraries), and it doesn't have an easy file transfer. But, let's face it, I learned what to do, and that's that. I still love having the ability to just plain WRITE when I need and want to. That says it all... (written 5 June 98)
Ciao, Michael Wittmann |
