Nihongo Word Processor v1.10

For being only about two years newer, Sharp's Nihongo Word Processor (henceforth, NWP) looks much nicer than EW. Its interface reminds me very much of classic Macintosh programs. Coincidentally, the Mac also used a Motorola 68000 CPU, though somehow I doubt it influenced interface design.

Besides being pretty, NWP is a perfectly serviceable word processor, with the standard features, plus one very neat divergence from the norm: on the right side of the screen is a pinboard with two notes attached to it. These represent the dual clipboard arrangement NWP uses. The left clipboard holds text which has been cut, and the right text which has been copied. There are separate paste commands for each.

It's a minor thing, perhaps, but it's exactly the kind of uniqueness that makes me interested in software from this era. At this time, the clipboard functionality was provided by each program individually, rather than by the operating system (and its associated standard libraries), so the implementation is a conscious choice by the developer.

As you look further back in software history, you can see different interface paradigms contending against one another for mindshare, each representing a different developer's idea about how the interface ought to be. Single clipboard with no history won this particular battle, though there are outliers like emacs's kill ring or the various 'clipboard managers' that provide something extra for the power user.

It looks like NWP shipped with certain models of the X68k. A positive bargain!