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In his new book, “Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing,” Matthew Kirschenbaum shows that word processing was once considered radical, empowering, even frightening and strange. English professors often study the ways in which old books were produced, distributed, and consumed. Now Kirschenbaum has turned that investigation to our own era — or to an era just before ours, the 1980s, when word processing and personal computing first caught on.

To rediscover the recent past, Kirschenbaum, an English professor at the University of Maryland, hunted for forgotten computer magazines on eBay; he booted up old computers and even older standalone word processors to re-create the experiences of their earliest users. At first, this technology drew plenty of skeptics, particularly in the literary community. (“The idea of literature,” Gore Vidal wrote in 1984, “is being erased by the word processor.”) But Kirschenbaum reveals that word processing not only created fresh possibilities but also revived things we associate with more classic forms of writing. In both cases, he reminds us just how quickly we came to accept this new (and now essential) approach.

Kirschenbaum spoke to Ideas by phone. Below is an edited excerpt.

IDEAS: Do you remember your first computer?

KIRSCHENBAUM: I remember it well. In fact, I still have it in my office. It’s an Apple IIe, and it still boots. We got that computer — it was the family computer — in the early ’80s, when I was 12 or 13. I didn’t really take to the programming side like some of my friends. Instead, I used it for two other things: I played games with it, and I wrote with it.

IDEAS: When did you realize word processing was a good topic for an English professor?

KIRSCHENBAUM: One of the commonplaces you absorb as a graduate student is that Mark Twain was the first person to use a typewriter — he called it a type machine — for a work of literature, “Life on the Mississippi.” About five years ago, I realized I didn’t know who would be Twain’s counterpart with the word processor. But firsts are always relative. Much depended on how you define terms like “write” and “word processor,” and I found several different candidates, including Jerry Pournelle, John Hersey, and Len Deighton.

IDEAS: Where did those names come from?

KIRSCHENBAUM: There was no one source. I spent time in traditional archives, going to Harvard’s Houghton Library and looking through [John] Updike’s papers, using his fonts to identify when he transitioned into word processing. I talked to dozens of writers and people on the tech side. And I actually had my own collection of old vintage computers — not just the Apple IIe but a couple dozen other machines. I tried to quite literally put myself in the shoes of an author at that time.

IDEAS: What did those early authors feel when they encountered this new technology?

KIRSCHENBAUM: The phrase they used again and again was “writing with light.” There was a sense of wonder, sitting in front of a piece of glass and typing and having your writing appear in luminescent letters. But there was another side of word processing — the physical quality. Early computers were big and noisy. They threw off heat. You had to learn how to handle floppy disks and change printer ribbons.

IDEAS: Despite those complications, many literary figures worried that word processing made writing too easy.