Thread by @fortelabs

1/ A thread of highlights from Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing by @mkirschenbaum which I can already tell I’m going to love

amazon.com/Track-Changes-…

First person to submit a book via a typewriter was Mark Twain in 1883, for A Life on the Mississippi

One of the first ppl to use a Mac for novel writing was Mona Simpson, Steve Jobs’ sister

A flurry of word processing innovations happened in just a 6 year period from 1977 to 1983

Wordstar, famously used by George R.R. Martin to write Game of Thrones, was released in 1987 as a triumph of modern software

It was coded by one person in 6 months, for a predecessor to DOS called CP/M, and many famous writers learned on it

TIL Word processors are aligned with poststructuralist, Derridean theory

There are clearly relationships between how word processing software/hardware is designed, and the impact it has on writers’ thinking and writing

In the early days of computing there were apparently “word processing-dedicated” computers purpose built to avoid “expense and complexity” of general purpose computers

She may have stuck with this machine for two decades because of its unusually wide aspect ratio, which allowed her to compose poetry without forced line breaks

Some writers like John McPhee wrote or adapted software to suit their thinking

Joan Didion noted that writing on computers was less like painting on a blank canvas, and more like sculpture. You slowly molded the piece through successive iterations

There are as many writing styles and approaches as there are writers. But word processing plays at least a part in almost all of them

The early days of word processing were baroque and kind of cyberpunk. Sometimes necessitating elaborate workarounds or, in Neal Stephenson’s case, a hand-coded LISP converter

From the beginning, there was this futurist utopian ideal that word processors would “perfect” the written word and enable an efficient, convenient lifestyle

Using a word processor to produce such a perfected piece of writing, everyone got to experience a little bit of the sublime bliss of bringing a piece of writing to “completion”

It is apparently James Patterson who best embodies the promise and peril of highly efficient, distributed, and partially automated writing. His prolific output comes from a Renaissance workshop-like system of apprentices

Absolutely incredible numbers behind Patterson’s production

Word processing unbundled writing into several different virtual operations, where it was once a single mechanical one. This made it both immediate and endlessly postponed, both simulated and suspended

But, as we’ve all experienced, this endless ability to revise and rewrite (or alternatively, procrastinate by eternally taking notes and outlining) means that writing on a word processor never seems finished

And as we’ve also all experienced, writing in this fluid way is also uniquely enabled by word processors, allowing us to think new thoughts in new ways

The real beginning of the word processing era was 1981, when it began to enter public consciousness alongside the popularization of integrated personal computers

In the early days there was an explosion of different word processor software, all with different feature sets and not compatible with each other. Hard to imagine in a world dominated by MS Word

Confronting the dizzying array of features and products and packages was a huge challenge, compounded by the machine being an intimate part of a writer’s creative process

Worlds collided, as in this story where writing, word processing, Exxon, gay history, and HIV/AIDS have an unlikely encounter

The sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov describes his first encounters with a personal computer and word processor in a series of 4 detailed articles in Popular Computing

It took him a long time to get used to it

But finally he took to it

Amazing to read how Stephen King and Peter Straub bought word processors and rigged up modems to be able to send each other passages for their joint book The Talisman. It reached speed of 1,000 words per minute!!!

Incredible to imagine two very successful and famous authors having to deal with such things, but this was part of making a word processor work at the time

Amy Tan (of The Joy Luck Club) bought a computer made by computing pioneer Alan Kay in 1983, and even started a user group

A wild Emacs appears! Amazing to think there’s a (small, but dedicated) group of people still using it to this day

Sci-fi writer Arthur C Clarke was a big fan of his Archives III word processor, which retailed for $8,500

Clarke and director Peter Hyams used one of the earliest versions of remote work, with Kaypro computers hooked up to modems sending text files across the world, years before the first email would be sent

Incredible to read what they had to do to facilitate sending something as simple as text, which we now complain about receiving all day

Just a few years later, by 1985, a 22 year-old Michael Chabon wrote his first novel on an Osborne 1. The era of “word processor natives” had begun

Stephen King was photographed in 1996 at his writing desk, with a Wang System 5 conspicuously in the background

Sci-fi writers were one of the first groups to adopt computers for writing

The sci-fi author Dr. Jerry Eugene Pournelle, who wrote a very influential column in Byte magazine, has a strong claim to being the first author to publish fiction using a word processing program on what was then called a microcomputer

He paid $12k for it including the printer, and had to battle the IRS over the unprecedented claim that a computer could be a legitimate business expense for a writer

Within a couple years, it was clear that Ezekiel had completely revolutionized his productivity as a writer, vastly reducing the time he had to spend on mechanical and repetitive work

What it looked like to use a microcomputer back then would be totally foreign to us today

Many sci-fi writers grasped the potential of general purpose minicomputers for going beyond just word processing, for example, using them to build simulations of the worlds they were creating

Interesting side story: Frank Herbert, then the top sci-fi author, wrote a non-fiction book in 1980 warning of the dangers of not buying a computer, and the amazing benefits to be had by acquiring one for one’s creativity, household, and society

The book proposed a design for a specialized computer designed for the need of writers, including a visual programming language called PROGRAMAP that would allow writers to organize their thoughts using flowcharts that compile into real code

Ironically, this computer system and programming language were far ahead of their time, and after spending $40k of his own money trying to develop it, Herbert finished his book about the promise and potential of personal computers for writers on an Olympia typewriter

Sci-fi writer and physicist Robert Forward had access to a mainframe computer running UNIX text editor TECO, which gave him considerably greater capabilities he used to write a 160k word novel. Technical capabilities were still a bottleneck on length/complexity of novels

Douglas Adams was one of the writers most associated with computers, and he became a collector and advocate for them early on. He foreshadowed that artificial intelligence wasn’t around the corner, and that computers would be used primarily as media tablets

Jack Vance depended heavily on his computer to keep writing as he lost his eyesight, with custom hardware and software we would later call adaptive technology. This foreshadowed accessibility as a key driver of innovation

Some writers didn’t adopt word processors until much later, such as Ursula K Guia and Octavia Butler. But the shift was inexorable

Ignorance of computers could also be a literary asset. William Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a typewriter because he couldn’t afford a computer, and when he finally got one it demystified a lot of what computers could do

But he was incredibly prescient that personal computers, once networked, would form a virtual unified universe he dubbed cyberspace

Gibbons later worked with Bruce Sterling on The Difference Engine (1990), which ushered in steampunk as a genre. They developed a completely new way of working uniquely enabled by their matching Apple II computers, sampling and borrowing and reworking outside sources

It was a surprise to many that writers seemed to be adopting personal computers at a faster rate than scientists. Especially sci-fi writers. I think this is due to the level of imagination required to see their usefulness at that time

Interestingly, it was the less glorified and more populist sci-fi writers who adopted word processing sooner, because they were less preoccupied with “bastardizing the craft” than literary elites

Early accounts struggled to articulate what these new devices were, including the term “TV Typewriter” prominently in advertisements such as this one for the Homebrew Computer Club

The pace of innovation was so rapid that multiple generations of tech overlapped with each other, creating Frankenstein like devices that had to work on multiple formats

Finally the juggernaut appears: Microsoft Word. It was developed by Hungarian-born computer prodigy Charles Simonyi, who used as his inspiration his work on the Bravo text editor (for the Xerox Alto, which inspired Steve Jobs to create Mac)

Incredible. It was a huge conceptual leap to think that computers would one day be dedicated to the exclusive use of individuals, and for such a mundane task as typing. It took a lot of foresight and courage for pioneers to advocate for this

Freeform, nonsequential writing and editing allowed for longer, more complex, more innovative kinds of writing, such as Douglas Hofstadter’s groundbreaking Godel, Escher, Bach which he said he couldn’t have imagined finishing w/out his text editor

Bravo text editor used bitmappimg screen tech, which allowed introduction of arbitrary formatting like boldface, italics, underlining. A demo alongside laser printers of fidelity of screen led to coining of WYSIWYG, which became holy grail

WYSIWYG kickstarted a cycle of innovation in software & hardware. These scenes of employees & their families coming in to write essays, newsletters, fliers, letters on Bravo are heartwarming & show critical importance of high fidelity printing

As normal ppl started using these programs, there was a need for better user experience. And by better, I mean “not atrocious” as evidenced by this hilarious anecdote

Larry Tesler and colleagues developed Gypsy as perhaps the first modern word processor, with familiar features like pointing with mouse, drag, double click, cut and paste, undo. This new experience had a remarkable effect on writers, such as this one

The PARC team did many demos of the Alto, Bravo and Gypsy, seeding the culture of computing. About a year before Jobs’ historic visit in 1979, a young Hollywood screenwriter visited PARC for inspiration for her screenplay, which would become Tron

Alan Kay became a technical advisor and suggested Macbird finish the script on an Alto, which allowed her to easily rewrite and revise. But she insisted on using Courier font because otherwise studio execs wouldn’t give it any respect

Tron gave the public a visual landscape for cyberspace. Although interestingly, the use of computer graphics was considered cheating, not a technological revolution at first. Same thing happened in writing, where it was looked down upon

Amazing to read about the conceptual innovations that had to happen, which were just as important as technological ones. For example, “quarter plane” model that treated the background of the text as a canvas that could be extended infinitely

First killer apps were word processing and spreadsheets. “Spreadsheet hackers” imagined themselves to be in intense virtual combat with numbers, competitively optimizing their projections in a scene that would replay itself with video games

Word processing was initially conceived as the female counterpart to spreadsheets, drawing on earlier stereotypes of women as typists on typewriters

Fascinating. The gendered status of word processing from the beginning may have led to the system of hierarchical menus, edit and view modes, and “admin access required” prompts that kept all users at arms’s length from the internal workings of the program

Word processing as a practice and a concept rode the wave of the “paperwork explosion” that executives faced, which was the earliest incarnation of the more general info explosion. WP both addressed the need to process more paperwork, and also contributed to it

A second perceived crisis was the “social office,” thought to be a “social disease” of distracted, unaccountable office workers (mostly women) who supposedly spent their workdays gossiping and wasting time

To combat this, dedicated word processing centers were created as descendants of typing pools, where mostly women would receive a stream of documents to be typed, revised, or distributed without knowing who it came from, in the name of efficiency

Thus typing secretaries became a modular, standardized, removable part of the organizational workflow. The removal of friction from writing wasn’t used for the emancipation of labor when it came to organizations

But working with early machines was uncomfortable, grueling work, and in 1981 a new publication, Processed World, started to publish cartoons, essays, and commentaries critical of office culture

Originally, oral dictation was considered just as much a part of word processing as full screen text editing. Word processors had dedicated capabilities for recording audio that were quite sophisticated, including remote access, auto cartridge loading, & continuous recording

Word processing modularized and codified the building blocks of language, letters and sentences and lines, into a fungible inventory that could be measured and assessed. Character counts became a meaningful and important metric

In 1979 novelist Stanley Elkin was given a word processor by his university employer, and it gave his literary career a second life after being diagnosed with MS

We finally arrive at a good answer as to what was the first book written on a word processor. Len Deighton’s fictional but highly realistic account of a nighttime air war over German-occupied Europe, which he had to remove a window to get into the house

His device, an MT/ST, was a compound device made up of an IBM Selectric typewriter connected to a magnetic tape storage unit. This combo allowed for the essential feature of word processing – suspended inscription

Development of the MT/ST began as early as 1956 (!) and even the simple principle of suspended inscription – stored typing through changeable, erasable magnetic media – presented many practical difficulties

It’s amazing to read how many chemical and mechanical inventions were needed even at this primitive stage. Here we see the very beginning stages of digital notes – blocks of text that could exist outside the main document, and be modularity addressable & accessible

MT/ST cost a staggering $10k, compared to its predecessor Selectric typewriter at $500. They came up with a brilliant marketing strategy: presenting it as an integrated solution w/ dictation products & focusing on high volume “power typers”

High price point of MT/MST encouraged businesses to reorganize their entire “internal system of text production” to fully utilize its capacity. You can see here beginnings of IBM’s eventual turn to consulting and selling integrated solutions

Actual origin of the term “word processing” seems to be an interaction between an American and German sales execs, who used textverarbeitung, or “text processing”

The machine was marketed as replacing secretaries, when in fact it required secretaries to be highly trained operators. IBM ran an extensive series of classes at its showrooms training them to use them

Linear nature of tape invites splicing, reconstitution, remixing, and collage effects, echoing Dadaist experiments compiling poetry out of strips of newspaper. Sometimes secretaries had to literally cut and paste strips of tape

Computers began to become characters, scenes, plot devices, and stylistic elements in the writing itself, as writers could refer to details of personal computing that readers would now be able to understand

And writing itself changed, possibly becoming more verbose, more elaborated, more voluminous, but also more refined, more iterated upon

Wow. Word processors allowed modern writers to do the remixing that is so familiar to DJs, musicians, and visual artists. It made writing into a free form, non-linear form of expression

Apple Macintosh was initially rejected by most writers, due to its toy-like design and severe limitations on word processing capabilities

Whereas MacWrite fell short with serious writers, MacPaint made immediate headway with graphic designers, due to its bitmapped screen and custom fonts, inspired by Steve Jobs’ dropping in on a calligraphy class in college

Putting design, layout, and font decisions within authorial control, the Mac ushered in the era of “desktop publishing”

Many modern authors experiment with technology in interesting ways, writing within publishing software, co-crediting designers, crowdsourcing books, and writing in the form of picto-graphs for ex

Conceptual artists have explored the internal logic (& inconsistencies) of word processing programs, such as this one by Matthew Fuller that deconstructs the famously complex Word interface

The complete shift to digital text has prompted fears of impermanence and loss, as exemplified in this account of author Maxine Hong Kingston losing her manuscript in a California Fire

But there are also miracles of recovery that wouldn’t be possible with paper, like digital archaeology

Derrida predicted that the computers of famous writers would be fetishized and memorialized in museums, which is in fact already happening as in the examples below

The earliest of Salman Rushdie’s museum computers is a Mac Performa (my first computer at the age of 10!), which exists as a complete virtual emulation for people to browse

There have already been cases of books completed and posthumously published by recovering files from digital media

The case of Douglas Adam’s posthumous book, collected form his computer by a friend and compiled by his editor, brings up a lot of interesting issues

David Foster Wallace had a fraught relationship with computers. He used them, but preferred to work longhand and then transcribe. But even his work could be reconstructed and published after his death

Frank Herbert’s son and a collaborator used an outline and extensive notes for “Dune 7” to finish the series after his death. But this generated a lot of controversy over whether it was true to his legacy

Digital media also makes it possible for “non-authorized” collectors to compile archives of a writer’s work, such as Paul Moran, who gathered a considerable collection of John Updike’s work by regularly going through his trash

The “track changes” feature takes on a deeper meaning in this context: it essentially allows us to view a writer’s creative process keystroke by keystroke, in real time if we so desire. The process itself has become an artifact

We now have “genetic texts” that embed the history of their own making, like DNA records a history of an organism’s evolution

Australian author Max Barry wrote his book Machine Man one page at a time, posting them online and getting feedback. He used a Concurrent Versioning System to track a complete versioning history, which he published online for anyone to browse

Barry thus recreated the worn, heavily marked up manuscripts of the pre-digital era, via a carefully engineered effect accessible around the world

Text has gone from an object or artifact to more like an event, borrowing the concept of event sourcing from its underlying software. The “current draft” is not a single monolithic thing, but the emergent end result of all the typing events pulled forward to the present moment

Just 10 years after all these incompatible and divergent products, by 1994 Microsoft Word dominated 90% of the word processing market, after winning the “word wars”

This book surprisingly doesn’t spend much time at all on Word. Because on the Mac, Word reached a kind of asymptote that very nearly fulfilled the ultimate vision of what a word processor could be

Word has definitely received it’s fair share of criticism of course. Among them, that in fulfilling the vision of word processing, it enshrined the document as the privileged artifact, instead of the text itself, which can get obscured

Interesting to read this, when over the last 10 years Word has definitely ceased to be the end all be all software for writing. Probably still the market leader, but only one option among many

A rival to Word’s monotheism is Scrivener, which offers a lot of features for researching, coordinating, and composing long form texts. Developed by former software dev Keith Blount and beloved by many professional writers

Love the label of “austerityware” for a new generation of minimalistic writing programs that explicitly mimic old school writing environments, even including locking you into the program and cutting off internet access to remove distractions

And even new devices are being created that explicitly recreate the minimalism and non-connectivity of bygone eras, such as the Hemingwrite, which was funded on Kickstarter

Word processing has been both dematerialized and commodified into an old fashioned, self-conscious activity that we evoke under very specific circumstances. But it’s also now ubiquitous, something we do all the time and everywhere across so many platforms

Looking back, word processing created new kinds of work rather than eliminating the need to work, and coexisted alongside other kinds of writing rather than replacing them wholesale