[victorp13]

Small nuance, but the term ワープロ馬鹿 actually is unrelated to software like MS Word, and refers to the at one point ubiquitous ワープロ (Word Pro) dedicated hardware device that many Japanese people owned in the 80s/90s to write letters. Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_processor#Japanese_word_p...

Interestingly the English Wikipedia page above only mentions Japanese word processor devices in a small section, but the Japanese version of that page is almost entirely dedicated to these hardware devices: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%AF%E3%83%BC%E3%83%89%E3...

I was lucky enough to live with a Japanese family in the early 90s and used one to learn how to type Japanese but also write letters home in my own language. I guess you had to live through this age to understand the difference of how Word Pro is used and the hardware association it has in Japanese.

[oracel]

The other weird thing about that term is that it's somewhat uncommon to see 馬鹿 actually written out in kanji, as those characters mean horse and deer with no direct association with 'idiot' (the proposed etymology is a reference to Chinese history and/or a Sanskrit loanword). I guess in a way the kanji form is a word processor autocomplete tell.

[Tor3]

A Toshiba Rupo word processor (found in both links) is safely stored in the backyard shed, together with some floppies and documentation. That'll be my winter project next year.

[movedx]

Thanks for sharing this part of your life. That’s so cool.