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The day we invented word processing (and neglected to patent the idea)Word processing was invented one busy afternoon in the offices of the weekly Solihull News, in September 1960, by a bunch of trainee reporters.If you remember manual typewriters you can picture the scene. First one junior, then another, winds a sheet of paper into a clapped-out manual typewriter. (Traditionally, typewriters started new in the office of some director's secretary and over decades passed down the heirarchy through progressively less skilled hands. The weekly paper reporter's room was the last stop before the scrapyard.) With furrowed brows the juniors, fresh from lunch in the nearby Saddler's Arms, type a few words. Keys operate unpredictably, syntax goes awry, facts appear not in the planned order; with a muttered oath the paper is torn from machines, crumpled and hurled towards the waste-paper basket. By the time the Chief Reporter reappears from a brief conference with the Editor the room is littered with balls of screwed-up paper, the air is blue (not just from cigarette smoke) and an air of collective gloom has descended. "What's the matter?" asks the chief, who later achieves fame as the founder of the Polite Society which turns into the Campaign for Courtesy. We explain. No matter how many times we do a handwritten draft, something goes wrong when we type. Second thoughts take over and we start re-drafting as we tap out the introductory paragraph, the "intro". What is needed, we decide, is a device featured in a recent science-fiction film. A keyboard attached in some electro-mechanical way to a television screen, on which our words would appear as we type before anything appears on paper. That will be done later by a teleprinter-type device also linked to our keyboard. As we muse on we realise that some kind of backspace key would be desirable, but with one salient difference between it and the typewriter's backspace key. As it moves back, our dream key will actually erase what it passes over. (It was standard practice then to backspace over an error, type the letter "x" as often as needed to obliterate the offending word or phrase, then carry on. Typesetters were trained to ignore such "x-ed out" material.) Typesetters? They were the men who keyboarded our work all over again, on giant Linotype(TM) machines that turned their keystrokes into lines of type cast from a reservoir of molten metal. Our far-ranging discussion led us to realise that controlling the whole imagined setup would require a computer, and a pretty fancy program. At this point we gave up. In 1960 only governments, giant companies or rich universities could afford computers which were very big, and needed air-conditioned accommodation at least the size of a house. They were used for incredibly long and complex calculations. Their output was invariably printed. How could we persuade university researchers to pursue the idea of getting letters and words up on a screen, just to make life easier for journalists? What newspaper group was large enough to afford its own computer? Think of the problems, the complexity, the cost! Sighing, we returned to work. Such devices would exist only late in our lives, if ever, and would never be entrusted to newspaper hacks. Unfortunately, we neglected to patent the idea. Imagine the royalties we'd have collected by now if we had. That combination of visionary thinking and sheer unworldliness characterises most reporters I have known. It helps to explain why so few journalists become rich. Historical NoteIn the 1960s a professor at a United States university set post-graduate students the task of linking a computer to a visual display unit in just the way we had imagined.Critics from academia and the computer industry poured scorn on such a pointless waste of research funds. Had they had their way, computers as we know them might still be a distant dream instead of 25-year-old reality. If you can supply the details, please email me: m and ep_AT_ang elfire _DOT_ com (remove spaces etc to make it work) and I'll do my best to include your tale on the next update of these pages. Links to other pages on this site. Top of this page. |