8 Jul
2016
8 Jul
'16
1:04 p.m.
On Jul 8, 2016, at 3:43 PM, Fred Cisin <cisin at
xenosoft.com> wrote:
On Fri, 8 Jul 2016, Paul Koning wrote:
I can think of any number of reasons. $10k, in 1964? That's half a house. Its user
interface may have been ill suited for the job; after all it was designed for business
documents. Finally, the tape capacity was 25 kbytes, which is only a few percent of the
size of a typical book. Len Deighton was a very successful writer by 1970; he may have
decided to spend piles of money on a new tool because he could. But few writers strike
it rich; they'd buy a good typewriter because it's a mandatory tool, but few would
want to spend more than that.
paul
I may have missed it, but I haven't seen the
IBM MT/ST mentioned. That's certainly a rather old system, dating back to 1964
according to Wikipedia, which says it's the oldest word processor (and references an
article about WP history).
The original post that started this thread referred to a URL
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/06/how-to-write-a-histor…
It suggested that one significant contender for that author's "FIRST author to
write a book on a word processor" was Len Deighton. In the late 1960s he bought one.
He wrote first drafts on his typewriter, then his secretary, Ellenor Handley, retyped it
into his MT/ST and edited it there.
Specifically, a novel entitled "Bomber", published in 1970.
If the MT/ST was released in 1964, then even with its high price, it seems odd that so
many years would go by before anybody used it for a book manuscript.