6-26-12: Word Processing in Literature

You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialize correctly.

WordProcessing-0626.mp3

This conversation originally aired January 10, 2012.

For hundreds of years, writers used pen and ink to put their thoughts to paper. By the late 1800s, they had a new tool: the typewriter...which was replaced by the end of the last century by the word processor.

That technological development has resulted in a sea change in how writing is done. University of Maryland Professor Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is chronicling it in an upcoming book, Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. He joins Nathan for a preview of the book.

You can follow the progress of Kirschenbaum's book at his Tumblr. And if you have something to share about the early history of word processing, you can write Matt at mkirschenbaum@gmail.com.

Since January, Matt has landed a book contract, and he's got a few other updates. Here's what he told us:

The book is now officially under contract to Harvard University press,
to be published in fall 2013.

In March I visited Microsoft and spent a week researching in their
corporate archives, one of the very few outsiders ever to be granted
such access.

On eBay, I obtained the first piece of office equipment ever marketed
by IBM as a "word processor." It weighs 200 pounds, retailed for
$10,000 in 1964, and is called the "Magnetic Tape Selectric
Typewriter." The novelist Len Deighton began using one in the late
1960s.

I have compiled a spreadsheet with data documenting the first
computers and word processor for around 100 prominent writers.

I have interviewed some two dozen people, on both the literary and
tech side. They include authors Peter Straub and Michael Ondaatje, as
well as locally-based writers Maud Casey and Sarah Blake. On the tech side, I
have interviewed Charles Simonyi (the "father of Word and Excel") and
Seymour Rubenstein (co-founder of Wordstar), among many others.