Whilst perusing the wares at Steven C. Preston's infinite money factory, I happened to find this strange and cool looking electronic.
Labeled the OASYS Lite F-ROM7, at first glance I really had no idea what this thing was. It sported a small screen, keyboard double printed with Latin and Katakana characters as well as a floppy drive.
Maybe it was some sort of a Japanese 8-bit pc? The arrow keys were a bit reminiscent of pictures I had seen of the FM TOWNS. Seeing stuff like this in a thrift store here was pretty rare, but on occasion the international students at the local collage would leave some interesting stuff behind.
So naturally I had to get this thing, and since I didn't have a car at the time, I carried it home about 3 miles like some kind of autistic cyberpunk Hunter S. Thompson wannabe.
It ended up being just a little bit of a let down though, when I got home and researched this thing, it wasn't any sort of computer but actually a electronic word processor. Still very neat nonetheless.
The OASYS Lite F-ROM7 was releases by Fujitsu in 1986, and was one of three word processor models in the F-ROM series. These machines included integrated printers, integrated monochrome screens (40 characters by 5 lines) of which the best model had a backlight, as well as the ability to store document projects on floppy discs (which is up to 230,000 characters apparently). The systems also had the ability to take these 'F-ROM' cards which can add character sets and extend some functionality.
These cards look a LOT like the 'SEGA Card' game cards or like the PC Engine/Turbografx 16 game cards. I suppose it was fairly common to distribute some software on little mask ROMs and put them in plastic housings because how cost effective it was to do so, it was just a few cents per unit this was as oppose to the labor and extra circuitry to make cartridges with memory mappers in them. Reading up about this kinda sent me down a little rabbit hole on how photolithography works lmao. Unfortunately mine didn't come with any software cards inside.
OFC, embarrassingly, I had to make a post flexing about my find on /g/. Please excuse the poorly and obviously Google translated Japanese, I was made fun of for it, and rightfully so.
In all practicality though, I'm not really completely sure what to do with this thing. It's neat but since I don't know Japanese, and all the menus are in Japanese, I cant really use it for it's intended purpose. I really had to fumble around for quite a while to get the text present in those picture on there.
The keyboard on it is fairly nice, and I did read a bit about it having a way to interface with a PC.. somehow. I'm not sure if they meant with the floppy disks or some kind of serial connection. Last time I looked at it i didn't really spot any I/O, but I think I'll have to pull it out of storage and check it out again, its been a while. It would be very cool to use this thing as a dummy terminal.
I've also mulled over the idea of modifying it to do such, or build some small Raspi type system inside like a Neuromancer type Cyberdeck, but since it is 100% functional the preservation purist inside me doesn't want to, even though it would be a very fun project.
To be continued//