When computers as we think of them today (microcomputers, as the terminology of the day would name them) were introduced, one of the most critical uses of them, and certainly the one most people took to the easiest, was typing out documents. Be it something for a business, a letter to a friend, writing the next great novel, or just keeping a digital journal (which would be an incredibly costly prospect back then), typing and then formatting text, a process known as “word processing.”
While today nowhere near as common a critical use of a computer as it was over 30 years ago, the word processor is still alive and well in professional and educational settings, as well as in the writing community. The word processor made it trivial to format text in a document in a way to be ready for publishing, something that the previous commonplace document creation tool, the typewriter, simply couldn’t do (at least, not without being an incredibly expensive machine on its own) and certainly if the machine could do such, it couldn’t do it as quickly or as simply.
Incidentally, I have used a “classic” word processor, in this case “Word Writer 128” for my Commodore 128, and I have to say, there is a charm to using an old 8-bit computer to type up something. It isn’t anywhere near the experience that Microsoft Word is, but that’s not the point. I just find the look back into computer history quite interesting.
Of course, we get to the meat of this article – the Computer Chronicles episode on Word Processing in 1983. A little bland, as it’s an early episode, but as always, a great slice of the time. Enjoy!