tezza
Veteran Member
On a rainy day you might want to look into it. "Purple Computing" made those portable drives and I'm fairly sure they worked with other brand names. You can resort to the tape cassette, as I believe the NEC has built-in support for "CLOAD/CSAVE" routines. BTW, those little PDD's weren't cheap. IIRC Radio Shack was selling them for @ $395 (usd) back in 1985. The company that I was working for at the time had a deal with Tandy, and we were able to purchase the Model 100 for about $395 or half price. Mine still works. Good luck with it.
Yes, I've got a tape deck for it, bought from someone on the VCF. See:
http://www.classic-computers.org.nz/blog/2011-09-26-a-nec-8201a-cassette-drive.htm
It works well.
In the day I used my original NEC 8201a all the time. Mostly for writing articles and lectures when I wasn't playing adventure games in bed :D . It was dead easy to upload the draft articles up into an IBM PC via RS232 where I could (in Wordstar) check it, do the final formatting, print it and save the article to disk for archiving. Thankfully I had argued that the PC needed a serial card. Those cards were hugely expensive those days. Anyway, given that our ONE departmental PC started to see some competition for use, it was great to have my own rugged portable word processor!
It was finally retired when I got my own office PC. I didn't need it anymore then, as the documents could go straight on the disk. By that time (1987?) Xywrite was the officially supported Word Processor.
Tez