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The History of Word Processing

Abstract

“Word processing” began as an IBM sales term for a $10,000 typewriter that recorded keystrokes on magnetic tape, introduced in 1964 so that a secretary could correct one line without retyping the page. Over the next thirty years the same job moved through three kinds of machine. First came dedicated office appliances: IBM’s MT/ST, Evelyn Berezin’s Redactron Data Secretary, the screen-based systems of Vydec, Lexitron and AES, and Wang’s 1976 Word Processing System, which made the category a boardroom purchase. Then came programs on personal computers: Electric Pencil in 1976, WordStar in 1979, WordPerfect, and Microsoft Word, which Charles Simonyi built on ideas from Xerox PARC’s Bravo and which went on sale on 25 October 1983. By the mid-1990s Word held most of the market and the dedicated machines were gone, in Japan as much as in America. Word’s dominance brought its own episodes: the first macro viruses, the paper clip Clippit, the ribbon, and a fight at ISO over the .docx file format. The third move, into the web browser, came with Writely and Google Docs in 2006, and Microsoft followed with Word in the browser in 2010 and the Copilot assistant in 2023.

IBM MTST in use
An IBM Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter in use. Image: Norsk Teknisk Museum, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Automatic Typewriters

Machines that typed form letters by themselves came first. From 1912 the Hooven company of Cincinnati sold an automatic typewriter, invented by Thomas McCall, that worked the keys of an ordinary typewriter from a perforated paper roll, borrowing the principle of the player piano; the pneumatic Auto-typist of 1927 and the mechanical Robotyper of 1935 followed and were made well into the postwar years. From the late 1950s the Friden Flexowriter typed from punched paper tape, and in the 1960s the Frankfurt firm Eichner sold a German equivalent, the tronictyper programat. All of them could only replay text that had been typed and punched beforehand. On 12 March 1938 Konrad Zuse, fresh from his mechanical Z1, typed a two-page proposal for a “message device” built on the Z1’s memory: cells of about a hundred characters, filled from a teleprinter line, from which form letters could be assembled, any address picked at random, and newspaper copy combined to drive a typesetting machine. Nothing came of it.

An IBM Word

The phrase came from IBM’s German subsidiary. In 1955 Ulrich Steinhilper, who worked at IBM’s Stuttgart branch, coined Textverarbeitung (and earned a 25-mark suggestion bonus for it), text processing, so that typewriters could be sold with the same arguments as the “data processing” machines of IBM’s computer divisions. IBM used the English form, word processing, to explain why a typewriter was worth what it charged for the Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter (MT/ST), introduced in 1964. The MT/ST combined an IBM Selectric with a tape drive: every keystroke was printed and recorded on tape, a correction typed over a mistake replaced it on the tape, and on playback the machine retyped the whole document without errors at about 150 words a minute. It had no processor in the modern sense; the logic was a bank of relays. The US price was about $10,000, and most customers rented, which suited IBM, whose office-products division lived on its lease base.

The British novelist Len Deighton leased one, sold in Europe as the MT72, in 1968, after his assistant Ellenor Handley mentioned to the IBM technician who serviced his typewriters that she was retyping chapter drafts dozens of times over. The 200-pound machine was lifted by crane through a window of his Georgian house. Deighton’s model had a second tape reel, so Handley could keep two bodies of text on line and merge them, and Deighton’s 1970 novel Bomber, a book of many interlocking episodes, became, in the literary scholar Matthew Kirschenbaum’s careful phrase, the first published novel written with a product explicitly brought to market as a “word processor.”

Appliances for the Typing Pool

Wang Word Processor DoD
A Wang word-processing terminal at the US Defense Audiovisual Agency. Image: US Department of Defense, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The MT/ST was aimed at the typing pool, the room of typists that large offices ran to produce letters and contracts. Its competitors in the early 1970s were small companies. Evelyn Berezin’s Redactron shipped the Data Secretary in September 1971, still with a typewriter and no screen, and in June 1975 built its 10,000th word processor. Screens came next. Lexitron and Linolex sold video-display editing stations from 1972, Vydec a screen-and-diskette system in 1973, and Stephen Dorsey’s Canadian company AES the AES-90 in late 1974, which showed the text on a screen as it would print and stored up to 340,000 words on an 8-inch floppy disk.

Business Week’s briefing on the market, on 30 June 1975, ran under the headline “A market mostly for the giants”: IBM still had nearly 90 percent of the $450 million market for editing typewriters, and analysts expected at least two-thirds of the 1980 market to be IBM’s. Berezin, whom the magazine quoted as president of Redactron, said her problem was money, not technology: “getting money in the past year has been a horror.” She sold Redactron to Burroughs in 1976.

The same year, Wang Laboratories unveiled the Wang Word Processing System, a screen-based system on which a secretary could see a page, move paragraphs and print. It turned word processing from an improved typewriter into office automation, and helped make Wang a company with about $3 billion a year in revenue at its 1980s peak (see Dead End: Wang Labs).

Bravo

At Xerox PARC the problem was approached from the other end. In 1974 Butler Lampson and Charles Simonyi wrote Bravo for the Alto, the first editor that displayed text on screen in the fonts, sizes and layout in which it would print, later called WYSIWYG, “what you see is what you get”. Larry Tesler and Tim Mott built Gypsy on the same machine in 1974–75 for an educational publisher, without Bravo’s modes and with cut, copy and paste. Xerox sold these ideas only in its Star workstation of 1981, at a price few offices paid. Simonyi, a Hungarian émigré (see Hungary’s Computing Industry), joined Microsoft in 1981.

Programs on Microcomputers

A German counterpart of the appliance market existed too: Nixdorf sold a word-processing system from 1974, based on one from the American firm Entrex, and in 1978 Allgeier of Bremen offered the System 2 alpha-color with a colour screen, disk and printer for 88,600 marks.

Michael Shrayer, who wanted to write the documentation for his Altair software without a typewriter, released Electric Pencil in December 1976, the first word processor for microcomputers, which wrapped words at the end of a line as the user typed. He sold it by mail order through advertisements in hobby magazines and ported it to 78 versions, but stopped developing it, and it lost the market to WordStar.

EasyWriter, written for the Apple II in 1979 by John Draper, the phone phreak known as Captain Crunch, partly while he was in prison, was adopted by IBM for its PC in 1981. WordStar, written by Rob Barnaby for Seymour Rubinstein’s MicroPro International and released in June 1979 for CP/M, sold 5,000 copies in its first eight months by MicroPro’s own advertising. Its cursor keys were Control plus the diamond of E, S, D and X, so that a touch typist never left the home row, and a generation of writers learned them. Bundled with the Osborne 1 (see Dead End: Osborne), it made MicroPro’s revenue rise from $500,000 in 1979 to $72 million in fiscal 1984. WordStar 2000, released in 1984, changed the file format and the commands its users knew, and many of them moved to WordPerfect, which held 85 percent of the DOS word-processor market in 1992. William F. Buckley Jr. stayed: “I’m told there are better programs, but I’m also told there are better alphabets.” So did George R. R. Martin, who told Conan O’Brien in May 2014 that he wrote his novels with WordStar 4.0 on a DOS computer that was not connected to the internet: “It does everything I want a word processing program to do and it doesn’t do anything else.” He had no use for spelling correction, or for “modern systems where you type a lowercase letter and it becomes a capital.”

Multi-Tool Word

At Microsoft Simonyi hired Richard Brodie, whom he had already hired at PARC in 1979 although Brodie had no college degree. In the summer of 1982 Brodie began a word processor designed for the mouse; “I had pretty much a free hand,” he said later. Microsoft, which had no stand of its own, showed it as Multi-Tool Word in a hotel during the COMDEX show in Atlanta in April 1983, and sold it from 25 October 1983 as Word, for MS-DOS and for Microsoft’s Unix, Xenix, at $375. The Microsoft Mouse it was built around cost $120 extra. Word needed 128 KB of memory and could show up to eight documents, or eight parts of one document, in windows on the screen; Microsoft advertised it as “Word does windows.” Bill Gates was impressed by the display speed, since Word reformatted the screen to match the printed page after every keystroke. About 100,000 subscribers of PC World found a demonstration copy bound into the November 1983 issue, an early case of software handed out on a magazine disk.

Reviewers were less taken. BYTE called it in 1984 “extremely frustrating to learn and operate efficiently”, and that year MicroPro still had 23 percent of the market against Word’s 8 percent. Word 4.0 for DOS added revision marks in 1987, the feature later called Track Changes, which gave Kirschenbaum the title of his 2016 book. Word 6.0 of 1993 was the last DOS version; when the year-2000 problem came up, Microsoft made Word 5.5 for DOS, from 1990, a free download.

Which birthday?

25 October 1983 is the release date in most reference works and the one the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum marks. Microsoft’s own timeline for 1983 gives another: on 29 September 1983 it “ships its full-featured word processing program, Word for MS-DOS 1.00”, with a free demonstration copy for subscribers of The PC World Software Review. The launch price varies too: $375 in the museum’s account, $395 in Wikipedia’s, which cites InfoWorld’s report of the May 1983 announcement.

Mac, Windows and Office

Word 1.0 for the Macintosh followed on 18 January 1985. On a machine where every program had a mouse and proportional fonts, Word fitted better than on DOS, and Word 5.1 of 1992 is still remembered by Mac users as the nimblest and most stable version. Word 6.0 for the Mac, in 1994, was slow, buggy and built from the Windows code, which Mac users resented. Microsoft apologized to reviewers and journalists, and in March 1995 gave registered owners the 6.0.1 update free, “hoping to make up for the ill-will”, as TidBITS put it.

Word for Windows arrived in late 1989 at $495. InfoWorld’s review: “If your system is powerful enough to support Microsoft Windows, at $495 it is an excellent value.” In 1990, by the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum’s figures, WordPerfect’s sales were worth $373 million and Word’s $125 million. When Windows 3.0 arrived that year WordPerfect was late to it, and Dataquest estimated in 1991 that Word had 55 percent of the Windows word-processor market. Microsoft also sold Word in a box with Excel and PowerPoint as Microsoft Office, for the Mac from 1989 and for Windows from 1990. Word overtook WordPerfect in 1992 (see Dead End: WordPerfect); in the first quarter of 1996 it had 80 percent of the worldwide market, and by the Computer History Museum’s count Word for Windows went from about half of word-processing revenue in 1993 to about 90 percent in 1997. On 25 March 2014 the museum published, with Microsoft’s permission, the source code of Word for Windows 1.1a as it stood on 10 January 1991: 1,021 files, mostly C with some x86 assembler, about 7 MB.

In West Germany the seventeen-year-old Marco Börries launched StarWriter in 1985 and founded Star Division in Lüneburg the following year. Sun Microsystems bought the company and its StarOffice suite in 1999 for $73.5 million and released the code as OpenOffice.org in 2000. After Oracle took over Sun, the project’s community forked it on 28 September 2010 as LibreOffice (see The Open Source Movement). The laser printer and PostScript carried the WYSIWYG idea into typesetting (see The Desktop Publishing Revolution).

Macro Viruses

A Word document could carry macros, small programs that Word ran by itself. In 1995 researchers found the first such virus to spread widely, Winword.Concept. It did little damage, but Microsoft had spread it itself, on a CD-ROM it sent to hardware makers for testing Windows 95; in September the company said fewer than 0.5 percent of Word users calling for help reported problems with it. Because people exchanged documents far more often than programs, Concept became the most widespread computer virus of any kind. On 26 March 1999 the Melissa virus, hidden in a Word document posted to a newsgroup, began mailing itself to the first fifty entries in each victim’s Outlook address book and swamped corporate mail servers (see The Antivirus Industry).

Clippit

Word 97, part of Office 97, introduced the Office Assistant, an animated paper clip named Clippit that everyone called Clippy. Kevan Atteberry, an illustrator Microsoft had contracted to draw characters for Microsoft Bob and Office 97, drew it on a Macintosh. It watched what the user typed: a document beginning “Dear” brought it up with “It looks like you’re writing a letter. Would you like help?” Gates mocked it in meetings, and Byron Reeves, one of the Stanford researchers whose work had inspired it, said later that “the worst thing about Clippy was that he interrupted.” Microsoft switched the Assistant off by default in Office XP, launched on 31 May 2001, with an advertising campaign in which the paper clip lost its job, and removed it in Office 2007. The story is told in Dead End: Microsoft Bob and Clippy.

Word also had a hidden trick for testers. Typing =rand() and pressing Enter filled the page with filler text; in the US edition of Word 2003 it was “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” a sentence that contains every letter of the alphabet. Jensen Harris of the Office team explained in 2005 that Microsoft used it internally to fill pages quickly, believed it worked back to Word 97, and had left it in because trainers found it useful. Word 2007 replaced the fox with paragraphs about Word’s own features; =rand.old() still brings the fox back, and =lorem() produces Latin.

Ribbon, XML and Aptos

By Word 2003 the program had accumulated so many menus and toolbars that users asked Microsoft for features it already had. Harris, who led the user-experience design of Office 2007: “The only problem was that people weren’t finding the very features they asked us to add.” Office 2007 replaced the menus and toolbars with the ribbon, a band of tabs with grouped buttons. Power users complained that relearning took too long; in one survey of Excel users the self-estimated loss of productivity averaged about 20 percent.

Word 2007 also changed the file format. The binary .doc, which over the years had been four different formats under one extension, gave way to .docx, a zip archive of XML files called Office Open XML. Ecma International approved it as ECMA-376 in December 2006. An ISO standard for office documents already existed, the OpenDocument format of OpenOffice.org, published as ISO/IEC 26300 on 30 November 2006, and the process for a second one was bitter. Microsoft’s fast-track ballot at ISO failed in September 2007 with about 3,500 comments; after a ballot resolution meeting in Geneva in February 2008, ISO announced on 2 April 2008 that the revised text had passed as ISO/IEC 29500.

Times New Roman had been Word’s default typeface until Office 2007 brought Calibri. In July 2023, after fifteen years, Microsoft announced that Calibri would give way to Aptos, by the type designer Steve Matteson, chosen from five commissioned candidates after Microsoft had asked users for their views, and named after a town in Santa Cruz County, California.

Kanji

Japanese could not be typed on a typewriter of reasonable size, so Japan got word processors late and kept them longer. Researchers under Ken-ichi Mori at Toshiba’s research centre worked out kana-to-kanji conversion, in which the typist enters the phonetic reading of a phrase and the machine proposes the characters from a dictionary. Toshiba announced the JW-10, the first Japanese word processor, in September 1978, exhibited it in October and shipped it in February 1979, a desk-sized machine based on a minicomputer, at ¥6.3 million. Prices then fell as they did in the West: Fujitsu sold a model at ¥220,000 in 1984, and in 1985 Toshiba’s laptop-sized Rupo cost ¥99,800. Dedicated word processors became a household appliance in Japan, with a record 2.71 million shipped in 1989.

Dead End: The Word-Processing Machine

The dedicated word processor lost because it was a computer that was allowed to run only one program. Once a general-purpose PC cost less than a Wang terminal, the PC ran the same job as one application among many, and the buyer got a spreadsheet and a database with it. In the United States the change was over by the end of the 1980s; Wang filed for bankruptcy in 1992. In Japan it came with Windows 95: 260,000 dedicated word processors were sold in 2000, under a tenth of the 1989 peak, Matsushita withdrew in December 2000, and Sharp, the last maker, stopped production in 2001. IBM ended support for the MT/ST in 1983.

The Browser

The next move took the document off the PC. Writely, built by Sam Schillace, Steve Newman and Claudia Carpenter at the small company Upstartle using the browser’s then-new ability to edit text in a web page, launched in August 2005. Google announced the acquisition of Upstartle on 9 March 2006 and released Google Docs, based on Writely, on 10 October 2006. Several people could now edit the same document at once, and from April 2010, in a rebuilt editor that Google first offered as a preview, they saw each other’s changes a character at a time.

Microsoft answered on 7 June 2010 with Office Web Apps, browser versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, which were later folded into the subscription service Office 365, now Microsoft 365. On 1 November 2023 Microsoft 365 Copilot, a large language model built into the suite, became available to enterprise customers at $30 per user a month. In Word it could summarize a document, rewrite a paragraph in a neutral, casual or professional tone, and turn text into a table (see The LLM Race).

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