Cassette based The CPT 4200 was a dual-cassette-tape unit with a small built-in keyboard that controlled a modified
IBM Selectric typewriter. Keystrokes entered on the typewriter appeared on the paper as they were recorded on the output cassette, which formed a magnetic replica of the characters printed on the page. That output cassette could later be used as an input cassette, where it would be played back to the typewriter along with new keystrokes to accomplish text editing. The keyboard of the CPT 4200 had action keys for "skip", "read" and "stop", mode keys for "word", "line", "paragraph," and "page." Pressing "read" transferred a word, line, paragraph, or page (depending on which mode key had been selected) from the input tape to both the typewriter and the output tape. Line boundaries (aka printer margins) recorded on the input tape were ignored or retained depending on whether or not the "adjust" key had been selected. Alternatively, pressing "skip" moved past the corresponding amount of text on the input tape without sending it to the typewriter or to the output tape. The Selectric's keyboard was active for any new typing, which would appear on the paper and transferred to the output tape. Thus a document was edited by reading back those parts of the text to be retained and skipping those parts to be discarded, with new typing added from the Selectric's keyboard. Price: approx. $5000, 1980-era values. The CPT Communicator was an add-on to the CPT 4200 that allowed data to be transferred from one text-editing machine to another, or between a text-editing machine and a remote computer, via phone lines. Price: not available.
Microprocessor based CPT 8000 series The CPT 8000 was the company's first microcomputer product, exhibited in spring of 1976. It was a self-contained desktop machine with two 8-inch
floppy diskette drives, a movable keyboard, and a full-page vertically oriented
CRT display simulating paper with black characters on a white background, for a view of text on paper. It was promoted as familiar and easy to use for those experienced with typewriters. A keyboard with a large set of extra keys made operating the 8000 quite easy even for people without any computer skills or background. IN, OUT, PRINT, OOPS *OOPS was changed thinking it was insulting to the buyer to assume they would ever make an error. The CPT 8000 was designed to show a full page of text with a static line showing the margin and tab stops. An additional line would display status or error messages with a times square like display. The times square error and status messages were very well done, "The printer needs a new ribbon" rather than "ERROR 034892". The text page could both smooth pan and scroll by the hardware in the display board and nothing quite like it existed for a very long time. The 8000 ran its own
multitasking hardware interrupt-driven
operating system but it also ran
CP/M quite well. So unlike other companies that sold Wordprocessor only systems, CPT had a system that could run any of the many popular CP/M applications. Using the CP/M OS users could develop
Fortran,
CBasic,
Cobol and other language's programs. The 8000 used
Intel's
8080 microprocessor. The display board was bleeding-edge, high-speed logic. The parts available at this time were pushed to their limits to provide the speed needed to display this much text. There were times that batches of parts from one manufacturer simply could not be clocked as fast as the 8000 display required. Memory was initially 64K, but larger boards of 128K were most common then later 256K were offered. The 8080 accessed this additional
RAM by running a custom
page flipping circuit. The 8000 was originally priced at $8000 and its
daisy wheel printer an additional $8000. The model number having been confused with the price at its first appearance at the Hanover fair. An
RS-232 serial communication option was available for the 8000 series that allowed the electronic transfer of documents. One very popular use of this was to access the Westlaw system. A tempest approved version of the 8000 was developed that was RF tight with nothing being emitted that could be monitored or spied on.
Storage Systems CPT WordPak The CPT WordPak series was CPT's first external document storage system that enabled multiple 8000 series workstations to store documents in an electronic filing cabinet. Prior to WordPak, all documents were stored on removable 8-inch
floppy diskettes. Sharing documents involved handing off the original disk, or copying the document to a second disk and '
sneaker-net-ing' (walking it over) to the second 8000. But this resulted in two copies of the document, one at each
workstation. A circuit board with a proprietary cable connector was installed in the 8000/6000 family of "workstations" and connected to the WordPak by a multi-conductor cable. WordPak 1 consisted of a single
Shugart Associates SA4000 14"-diameter
hard disk with a capacity of 30
megabytes. WordPak 2 added a 2nd drive for a total of 60
megabytes.
CPT SRS 45 The CPT SRS 45 was what would now be called a server (quite likely the first of its kind) but in practice was much more. It was maybe the worlds easiest networking shared resource system. It combined a ZIP drive for backup and hard disk(s) that would be shared simultaneously by up to eight CPT machines that had the PC AT bus. The primary person responsible for its development was Bill Davidson whose wife Cheryl was responsible for bringing up CP/M,
MP/M and other
Digital Research products running on the Phoenix. The brilliance of the system were the networking cards that plugged into the individual machines. These used the 55AA installable
driver of the
IBM BIOS to simply add the zip and hard disk drives to each computers drives list. So a system that started with floppy drives A and B and a C hard disk on the machine would have the SRS 45 drives added as drives D (E, F depending on the number of hard disk) and Z for the zip drive. Sharing (avoiding writing to the same file at the same time) was handled by simply assigning parts of the drives for individuals and other directories for shared use. No "driver" software was needed. You simply plugged in the networking card and your machine had additional drives that were internal to the SRS45. This approach was far ahead of its time and sadly never recognized for its brilliance. The SRS45 as were all CPT machines not just dedicated Word Processors.
Personal-computer based CPT PT software CPT PT was a reduced a version of the software that ran under
MS-DOS as an application on
IBM PC compatible computers.
Hardcopy Printers Daisy Wheel Printers Daisy wheel printers from Qume Corporation and Diablo Systems could be connected to the 8000 and 8500 series word processors. These printers could support both fixed pitch and proportional fonts, but could not print graphics/pictures. Price: unknown
Laser Printers Laser printers were required for printing the documents produced by the Phoenix series word processors as the documents produced could contain embedded graphics. Price: unknown ==Nameplates of selected products==