Word Processing Word Processing HistoryHistory

Trisha Cummings

The Beginning Word processing did not develop out of computer technology. It evolved from the needs of writers rather than those of mathematicians,

only later merging with the computer field. The history of word processing is the story of the gradual automation of the

physical aspects of writing and editing, and the refinement of the technology to make it available to individual and corporate users.

The invention of printing and moveable type at the end of the Middle Ages was the initial step in this automation.

But the first major advance from manual writing as far as the individual was concerned was the typewriter. Henry Mill, an English engineer of the early eighteenth century, is credited with its invention.

The fact that almost nothing is known about his early version today is evidence of its lack of success.

Christopher Latham Sholes, with the assistance of two colleagues, invented the first successful manual typewriter in 1867.

It began to be marketed commercially in 1874, rather improbably by a gun manufacturing company, E. Remington and Sons.

The main drawback of this model was that it printed on the underside of the roller, so that the typist could not view his work until he had finished.

Acceptance of the typewriter was slow at first, but was facilitated over the next several years by various improvements.

These included: the shift key, which made it possible to type both capital and lower-case letters with the same keys (1878); printing on the upper side of the roller (1880); and the tab key, permitting the setting of margins (1897).

Eventually, at first in the corporate sector, the typewriter began to catch on. Businesses, which had hitherto had their records and correspondence written

and copied by hand, found their paperwork could be done more quickly and legibly on the typewriter.

Typewriting was put within the reach of individuals by the development of portable models, first marketed in the early 1900s.

Thomas Edison patented an electric typewriter in 1872, but the first workable model was not introduced until the 1920s.

In the 1930s IBM introduced a more refined version, the IBM Electromatic. It "greatly increased typing speeds and quickly gained wide acceptance in the business community."

This was soon followed by the M. Shultz Company's introduction of the automatic or repetitive typewriter, perhaps the greatest step from the typewriter towards modern word processing.

The Shultz machine's main innovation was automatic storage of information for later retrieval.

It was a sort of "player typewriter," punch-coding text onto paper rolls similar to those used in player pianos, which could later be used to activate the keys of the typewriter in the same order as the initial typing.

With the automatic typewriter, it was possible to produce multiple typed copies of form letters identical in appearance to the hand-typed original, without the intermediary of carbons, photocopiers or typesetting.

The bulky paper roll machine was succeeded by a device called the Flexowriter, which used paper tape.

This had a key that allowed the deletion of mistakes from the tape and copies by punching a "non-print" code over the code for the character erroniously typed.

Long passages of text could be deleted or moved by literally cutting the tape and pasting it back together.

In 1961 IBM introduced the Selectric typewriter, which replaced the standard movable carriage and individual typestrikers with a revolving typeball (often refered to as a "golfball" or "walnut"). This could print faster than the traditional typewriter.

In 1964 IBM brought out the MT/ST (Magnetic Tape/Selectric Typewriter), which combined the features of the Selectric with a magnetic tape drive.

Magnetic tape was the first reusable storage medium for typed information. With this, for the first time, typed material could be edited without having to retype

the whole text or chop up a coded copy. On the tape, information could be stored, replayed (that is, retyped automatically from the stored information), corrected, reprinted as many times as needed, and then erased and reused for other projects.

This development marked the beginning of word processing as it is known today. It also introduced word processing as a definite idea and concept. The term was first used in IBM's marketing of the MT/ST as a "word processing"

machine. It was a translation of the German word textverabeitung, coined in the late 1950s by

Ulrich Steinhilper, an IBM engineer. He used it as a more precise term for what was done by the act of typing. IBM redefined it "to describe electronic ways of handling a standard set of office

activities -- composing, revising, printing, and filing written documents."

In 1969 IBM introduced MagCards, magnetic cards that were slipped into a box attached to the typewriter and recorded text as it was typed on paper.

The cards could then be used to recall and reprint text. These were useful mostly to companies which sent out large numbers of

form letters. However, only about one page-worth of text could be stored on each

card. In 1972 Lexitron and Linolex developed a similar word processing

system, but included video display screens and tape cassettes for storage.

With the screen, text could be entered and corrected without having to produce a hard copy.

Printing could be delayed until the writer was satisfied with the material.

The floppy disk marked a new stage in the evolution of storage media.

Developed by IBM in the early 1970s for use in data processing (that is, traditional number computation), it was soon adopted by the word processing industry.

Vydec, in 1973, seems to have been the first manufacturer to produce a word processing system using floppy disks for storage.

Previous storage media could only hold one or two pages of text, but the early disks were capable of holding 80 to 100 pages.

This increased storage capacity permitted the creation and easy editing of multipage documents without the necessity of changing storage receptacles.

Floppy disks could also be used to hold programs. The most important advance in word processing was the change from "hard wired"

instructions built into the machinery to software on disks. When the programs were part of the equipment they were difficult to change and

expensive to upgrade. Programs on disks could be updated more economically, since a rewritten program

could be loaded into and used with the same hardware as the old one. Before disk programs most word processing packages were "dedicated" systems, which

were bulky and expensive, and did not admit computing functions other than word processing.

Disk programs made it practical to develop packages for use with personal computers, first made available in completely assembled form in 1977.

Thus the separation of the software from the hardware also opened up the field to individuals.

Word processing is now "one of the most common general applications for personal computers."

Over the next ten years many new features were introduced in the field.

One important innovation was the development of spelling check and mailing list programs.

Another advance, introduced by Xerox in its Star Information System, allowed working on more than one document at a time on the same screen.

Some programs now even incorporate bookkeeping and inventory functions, combining word processing with data processing and completing the marriage of the word processor to the computer.

The combined field is known as information processing. The introduction and evolution of the specific word processing

programs available today is not covered well in the literature. Authors seem to assume that their readers will automatically be

familiar with recent developments, despite the fact that if they were they would not be buying the literature.

Word Perfect is part of the Corel Office Package and was once the preferred word processing program

Microsoft has Word

Dan Bricklin

helped create one of the early screen-based word processors in the mid-1970's.

Here are some of his recollections about that time

Word processors evolved from typewriters. The earliest ones were merely electric typewriters

with a tape recorder that could be edited. They were first used for automatic typing of letters. Later, they were used to playback material that was

typed correctly when corrections were added. The "manual" way, at the time, was to have a typist

type something, have it proofread, and then retype it with corrections, hoping that no new errors were introduced with the retyping.

The word processor insured that the parts that were left alone did not change.

Those early word processors were very much designed to control the typewriter to which they were connected.

The operators were specially trained typists.

Most of the early products were "page oriented" as opposed to "document oriented".

This meant that they dealt with documents as a series of separate pages, and the page breaks were very important barriers.

For example, if you added text to the middle of a page such that it pushed other text off the bottom, you had to "cut" the extra and move it to the next page.

If that pushed text off that page, you had to do it again and again. This page orientation was very helpful for carefully lining up letters, newsletters,

and the other documents that made up most of the target market. The machines were expensive and were justified for the repetitive work of

fundraising form letters and the exacting requirements of newsletters and small newspapers.

The early units often used IBM Selectric printing mechanisms that had changeable fonts (by replacing the typing ball) and were used as simple typesetting machines for newspapers.

General purpose personal computers were still in the future, and each computer was built specially to do word processing.

With the advent of inexpensive video computer screens, the connection to the typewriter as input device was broken.

Some early devices tried to avoid this break, and simulated the look and feel of a typewriter by making the screen act as much like a piece of paper as possible, even going as far as having margin setting levers that were under the screen just like those under paper on a typewriter.

These devices kept the page orientation. Some of the early screen-based word processors broke with this page oriented tradition and

dealt with the entire document as one long string of text, with the pagination done at print time.

Explicit pagination was left to extra commands, such as explicit page breaks. These machines were WYSIWYG versions of the RUNOFF programs on large timesharing

computers. Features we take for granted today, such as having margins and other paragraph settings

spanning a certain amount of text, had to be invented. Much debate went on between the page and document oriented camps, continuing to this

day with some page-layout vs. word processing programs. In all cases, the design goal of the word processor was to produce a final paper output. The

initial uses were not even the authors, they were the typists and typesetters.

Resources

History of Word Processing

http://www.gooddocuments.com/philosophy/wphistory_m.htm

History of Word Processing

http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2002/cmsc434-0101/MUIseum/applications/wordhistory.html