I would love to know what business niche these have been filling in Japan - TFA states that this series of machine has been offered since 1984.

Does it have an operating system like Win/*nix? Or something more bespoke? Does it offer the user an experience free of internet related distractions?

After yesterday's retro-look case https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42180217 I was expecting someone got an old dot matrix printer, gutted it and put in a modern PC into it.

Let me check eBay for printers...

The original Apple LaserWriter had a 68000 chip that was more powerful than the Mac it was attached to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68000_series#Main_use...

As article alludes, this is basically an industrial or point of sale device. I imagine it in something like a car repair shop, where your order and estimate gets printed on a 3 part carbonless form. More compact than a PC with a separate printer, but I bet it's expensive. Still cool.

> 1024 x 768 LCD screen is more than enough for those tasks.

In what decade? Little to no modern versions of PC software look good at this resolution. Even Excel is going to look like crap.