https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/06/how-to-write-a-history-of-writing-software/489173/

The journalist David Halberstam sits at his desk in 1993, surrounded by papers and his word processor.

It’s hard to believe, but one of the most important changes in the way people write in the last 50 years has been largely overlooked by historians of literature. The word processor—that is, ​any computer software or hardware used for writing, a nearly ubiquitous technology adopted by poets, novelists, graduate students, foreign correspondents, and CEOs—has never gotten its own literary history.

Perhaps it was just too much under our noses—or, I suppose, in front of them.

Now it finally has one. Five years ago, Matthew Kirschenbaum, an English professor at the University of Maryland, realized that no one seemed to know who wrote the first novel with the help of a word processor. He’s just published the fruit of his efforts: Track Changes, the first book-length story of word processing.

It is more than a history of high art. Kirschenbaum follows how writers of popular and genre fiction adopted the technology long before vaunted novelists did. He determines how their writing habits and financial powers changed once they moved from typewriter to computing. And he details the unsettled ways that the computer first entered the home. (When he first bought a computer, for example, the science-fiction legend Isaac Asimov wasn’t sure whether it should go in the living room or the study.)

His new history joins a much larger body of scholarship about other modern writing technologies—specifically, typewriters. For instance, scholars confidently believe that the first book ever written with a typewriter was Life on the Mississippi, by Mark Twain. They have conducted typographical forensics to identify precisely how T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland was composed—which typewriters were used, and when. And they have collected certain important machines for their archives.

One day, a similarly expansive body of work may exist for writing software—and Kirschenbaum will be one of its first builders. I spoke to him last month about his effort. This interview has been edited and condensed for the sake of clarity.

Robinson Meyer: “Who was the first author to write a novel on a word processor?” You cast that question as what drove you to write this book. Is there something close to a definitive answer for it?

Matthew Kirschenbaum: We can’t know with absolute certainty, I don’t think, but there are a couple of different answers.

If we think of a word processor or a computer as something close to what we understand today—essentially a typewriter connected to a TV set—there are a couple of contenders from the mid- to late-1970s. Notably Jerry Pournelle, who was a science fiction author. He is probably the first person to sit and compose at a “typewriter” connected to a “TV screen”—to compose there, to edit, and revise there, and then to send copy to his publisher. That was probably a novella called Spirals.

If we move back a little bit further, there’s an interesting story about a writer named John Hersey, the novelist and journalist. He did the famous book Hiroshima. He was at Yale in the early 1970s, so maybe about five years before Pournelle, and he worked on one of the mainframe systems there. He didn’t compose the draft of the novel he was working on at the keyboard, but he did edit it, and use the computer to typeset camera-ready copy.

So those are two candidates. But in many ways the most interesting, and in some sense the truest, candidate for that particular honorific is a British author named Len Deighton. He wrote espionage thrillers; I describe him as the Tom Clancy of his day, very commercially successful. He was able, in the late 1960s, to afford a piece of equipment that IBM had put on the market. It was the first product they actually sold and marketed as a word processor. It was called the Magnetic Tape/Selectric Typewriter, the MT/ST.

There was no screen on the MT/ST, but all of the character strokes and keyboard input were saved to magnetic tape. A skilled operator could then use that to revise, just as we do with a word processor. So Len Deighton, working with his secretary—a woman named Ellenor Handley—wrote a novel entitled Bomber on the MT/ST, and it was published in 1970.

That arrangement too was very typical. Often it was the secretary, who was very often female, who learned to operate the word processor. She was the one who actually processed the text, if you will.

Meyer: When someone used the MT/ST, did they have to remember what they were typing? Did it print out on a page?

Kirschenbaum: Your “screen” was the sheet of paper you had in your Selectric typewriter. You did your typing on the Selectric—which is the same typewriter, for example, we see in Mad Men; it’s a famous ’60s-era electric typewriter—and if you made mistakes, you would backspace. You would get a mess on the sheet of paper that was currently on the Selectric, but the correct sequence of character strokes was being stored on the tape. Then you would put a clean sheet of paper into the typewriter and it would automatically print out, sort of player-piano fashion, the text stored on the tape’s storage.

This unit sold in the 1960s for $10,000. That’s obviously quite a lot of money, and IBM used the term word processing as a marketing device. And Deighton was the first and one of the very few individuals who had one in his home. The real market, of course, was the business world.