In the late 60s when I started in the corporate world, the term word processing didn’t even exist. If you talked about typing, people would send you to the typing pool where six or eight typists worked on all the documents that we accountants and finance people generated for analytic reports or the monthly financials. Not much technology there yet.
One fancy bit of tech our company did have around then, though, was a centralized calculator system made by Wang Laboratories. The engineers got little nixie-tube calculators on their desks which were all connected by cable to the central processing unit. Wildly powerful by the day’s standards, these replaced slide rules and tedious hand calculations in their design work. Wang, incidentally, was founded by An Wang a physicist who was literally “present at the creation” of computers — he held the patent for core memory which he sold to IBM for the funds to start Wang Laboratories.
A few years later, Wang moved heavily into the new field of word processing. They married a CRT screen with a keyboard, central processor and IBM Selectric typewriter. Typists could now make corrections on the screen, making letter-perfect hard copies in an instant.
The office was never the same. Productivity — and accuracy, skyrocketed.
Wang, of course, was not the only maker of word processors. IBM offered a variety of systems from somewhat enhanced Selectrics on up. Xerox, a technology giant in the early days of computing (they invented the ethernet, came up with the idea of a graphical user interface, invented the mouse all while riding the exploding dry copier market), offered centralized systems of microprocessor-driven typing workstations married to high production Xerox printers. Our company saw the benefit of this latter approach and set up a divisional word processing group in the early 80s around one of these Xerox systems. One hallmark of our system was its use of 8-inch floppies for storage.
Another revolution was in progress about then: people began to realize that the little microcomputers in the IBM PCs and Apples were fully capable of running text editors that looked just like these dedicated word processors. When mated to Selectrics, daisy-wheel printers or the then-very-new laser printers, they could compete head-to-head for the typists’ desktop.
The race was on among software writers for whose program would dominate this market. 1976’s Electric Pencil may have been the first, but another early leader was WordStar, a program ultimately hated by most users and remembered chiefly for its arcane keyboard sequences for editing.
Multimate gained some traction since it emulated the interface of the standalone Wang word processors.
PCs we’re moving into the office en masse by the mid-80s. The variety of uses afforded by spreadsheets, databases and word processors fueled their almost complete victory of the more specialized devices. Packages popped up like mushrooms — PC Magazine reviewed 57 different ones in 1986. The clear leader, though bt then was WordPerfect with over 50% share worldwide through the mid-90s, but another tectonic shift, the arrival of Microsoft’s Windows 3, dethroned it. WordPerfect failed to ride the change. By 1990, Microsoft’s Word had muscled its way to a 95% market share by 2000.
The graphical interfaces of Windows and Apple’s Macintosh computers coupled with cheap dot matrix, ink jet and laser printers to finally deliver on the promise of WYSIWYG word processsing.