I mean, look, WordStar was a huge step up from a typewriter. It (and programs like it) made it possible for people like me to write.
WordStar let you get the words right. WordPerfect let you do "you asked for it, you got it" layout, which was a step up. But MacWrite and programs like it let you do WYSIWYG layout, which was huge. It was like going from typewriter to WordStar, but for layout and appearance. (The words are still more important, but the presentation also matters.)
I always wonder how many people actually used typewriters before talking about them in comparison to word processors.
By the late 1970s or early 1980s, typewriters had electronic memory. They had error correction "tape" so you could erase mistakes. You could set them to center or right justify text. You could create tables of justified text.
Early word processing software was amazing because it gave you more memory to work with, and didn't force you to keep so much of what you previously wrote in your head. But it was only a large step forward compared to typewriters of the time.
I wrote papers in graduate school using a typewriter before switching to a Mac Plus. It was a Smith-Corona and used a cartridge "ribbon" and a special "correction ribbon" that lifted off the text (instead of using white-out).
It wasn't a Selectric, though, so mostly you just used it as a typewriter. Selectrics were expensive and mostly used in business rather than by individuals.
Even the IBM Selectrics were nothing like as good as having a word processor, which is why the transition was so fast. A friend of mine was in commercial real-estate in that period (mid-1980s) and discovered that with a computer, he could type his own offer letters and not have to bother with a secretary. My brother's law firm went through something similar. In a handful of years, there was huge adoption.
A student organization I was an officer in had a Selectric with a correcting ribbon and I ended up using it for a lot of papers latterly. The newspaper had Royal typewriters and I used those. We did a bunch of literal copy/pasting and then stuff was typed into a huge typesetting system.
Grad school (starting 1979), there was a mainframe with DecWriter terminals and that was a big improvement but still nothing like terminal GUIs.
Selectrics never had any word processor-like functionality aside from the ability to erase. They were very expensive for being just amazing pieces of mechanical engineering but the daisy wheel products worked well enough and could be infused with a little computerized help because they were already electronic.
> By the late 1970s or early 1980s, typewriters had electronic memory. They had error correction "tape" so you could erase mistakes.
Sure, there were electronic typewriters where you could type an entire line or two into memory before printing it. And, as you say, typewriters with whiteout reels that allowed you to backspace.
But if you've started a new paragraph, and you realise you want to go back and edit the previous one, and everything else needs to move down a line to accommodate? Good chance you're throwing the page away and starting from scratch.
Or you're cutting and pasting in the literal sense, using scissors and glue.
Typewriters were difficult enough that "typist" was a professional job - and many workers wouldn't do their own typing, instead recording messages onto tiny tape cassettes for a typist to type up later on. There were even foot-pedal-controlled cassette players, so typists could type with their hands and control the dictaphone tape with their feet!
Even Word Perfect was much, much better at this than a typewriter. What made it hard to use was that you had to memorize a bunch of special function keybindings, as I recall. Yes, GUI word processors were much better than this, but even Word Perfect looked compelling compared to using a typewriter.
I wrote a bunch of papers using a typewriter. Standard operating procedure was to plan out the complete paper, basically as a tree of bullet points (I used index cards), and then turn those into sentences at the typewriter. All the writing/reorganization had to happen before you sat down to type.
Early word-processing software changed very little of that - the problem was cultural, not technological. Big offices had a typing pool where professional typists would type up memos and documents. It took a while for that culture to change where people realized they could, and should, do their own typing. Small business led the way because they couldn't afford a dedicated typing pool.
It's also technology was much less ubiquitous back then and less evenly distributed, at least in my experience.
I went from a mechanical typewriter which had the whiteout tape as it's only "advanced" feature, directly to a WYSIWYG editor. It was absolutely night and day. I only saw an "advanced" electronic typewriter later in life at my grandparents house, which was used rarely and only for her accounting business as it was so expensive when they first bought it.
As far as I know my experience was pretty much normal for my peer group - as my school had a similar setup. As a kid in school, it was amazing going from having to totally re-type a rough draft to being able to make some casual edits and hit print. Hours saved for each paper, especially with the typing skills I had back then!
Most 70s-80s advanced typewriter were just not regular household material. Even among white collar jobs. My parents (and mini me) worked on very mediocre type writers, until my dad got a PC from work with WordPerfect. Interesting from an economical perspective is that the 'top' typewriters were a lot more affordable than early pc's. People just didn't buy them. What they had was good enough, regardless of features. My dad ended up so enthusiastic for PC's to later spend more than a monthly wage on a PC for the family (actually: me). Every two years. Incredible, especially compared to the afforability of digital devices nowadays.
Word processing software was to writing as smartphones were to photography, or as the book press was to writing. Perhaps not transformational on a per feature basis, but transformational on grounds of the possibilities and market it unlocked.
I learned to type on an electric typewriter :) It wasn't a fancy word processing one with memory, but just that the hammers struck the paper using a motor making it easier to type. It also made a very satisfying 'thunk' which I would randomly trigger while the teacher was talking that in turn caused me to get thrown out of class a number of times.
> By the late 1970s or early 1980s, typewriters had electronic memory.
Were such fancy machines actually common? I never saw one. For me, it was all "CHUNK CHUNK CHUNK CHUNK oops! damn", until it was a whole new world with MacWrite and the ImageWriter.
Such typewriters were used by business, not students or individuals at home. Those machines cost several thousand dollars in today's dollars, just to put a perspective on things. Whereas a "normal", manual typewriter cost several hundred dollars in today's dollars. Most of us therefore had a manual typewriter. Touch typing was out of the question! Let alone any fancy-schmancy word processing!
Boy, oh boy were the early gen word processors a godsend!
I did. I used my mom's typewriter, which she typed her thesis on in the 1950s, and switched to word processing on a college owned TRS-80 before getting an MS-DOS machine of my own.
The big breakthrough was editing. WYSIWIG didn't solve a problem in that space. College papers didn't need different fonts, and it was sufficient to let the computer take care of formatting, like using Markdown.
I'm not dismissing the Apple, but it was priced out of my reach in 1984.
In Southern Europe Apple hardware has always been the most expensive one among systems for home users.
Hence why I had to wait until university to actually see them outside computer magazines, and only one room had them on the computer labs, versus the whole campus filled with PCs and UNIX terminals.
I learned typing on an IBM Selectric, my parents made me take a typing course before they would buy a computer. White-out or correction tape was how we fixed typos (or just didn't make them). If you were smart you wrote your words out longhand before typing them; you didn't "think" while typing.
The early computerized typewriters kinda sucked - you could do line level edits but the print quality was dot matrix or worse.
Hi, author of the article here. I do most of my drafting of these longer articles on a Freewrite Alpha, which is effectively an electronic typewriter. When I use it I have one rule: the backspace key is banned. This makes me restate my thoughts if I make a typo or just bulldoze through it. I find that this makes me make better drafts in the process.
You might be blessed with a brain for written communication.
If I did not allow myself revision and improvement to my written text, everything I write would read like a spoken monologue, and be multiple times longer than necessary to convey my message.
On the other hand, Xena might also have a brain broken for written communication, and this is the best way to deal with it!
I have only recently learned that I have ADHD, and have been trying to iron out all the implications of that (well, that and autism, which I also only recently learned about) -- I cannot help but wonder if a workflow like this would help me in my writing....
Lemme tell you, it functions like a gift but feels like a curse in terms of how it affects my daily life. ADHD medicine doesn't help consistently, it sucks lol
There is a reason I do _extensive_ editing after the fact, here's the draft for Soylent Green is people [1]: https://gist.github.com/Xe/3fe0236412c1ce16389bfcd6c6562d7a The differences I added in editing are _vast_ and really transform the work from a ranty mess that approaches readability to something that's worthy of publishing.
I have another article about AI coming out about how we could use generative AI to make art that we've never seen before, but it's mostly used for AI slop. I'm in the middle of ranting it out into the typewriter. It's bad currently, but I make it bad first so I can remake it better later. Here's an excerpt of the intro that I'm going to be rewriting. This is the "raw clay" that I mold in editing.
> I like creating things. There's a lot of joy in being able to sit there, think about a thing, and then make that thing come into existence. This is something I really enjoy doing and I'm blessed to be able to do that as my job in DevRel.
> One of the core conflicts that i end up having with the stuff I create is that I am a bit more artistically minded than people would expect out of the gate. I mean, I get it. Tech isn't really known for *art*, it's a lot more known for being the barrier between you and artists you want to follow.
> Howeever I've ended up seeing kind of a disturbing pattern with AI tools that are meant or at least intended to aid people in the creation of art: they're almost always used to create infinite slop machines without a lick of art in the process. Today I'm going to talk about this fundamental conflict between two categories: art and content. Art is that which conveys, inspires and tells stories. Content is what goes between the ads so that media moguls can see their profit lines go up. I want to argue that a lot of what AI tools are actually being used for is content that is gussied up as if it is art.
If you want to see what the entire writing process looks like after it festers for a while in my head, I wrote out the holy grail article on Twitch: https://youtu.be/N_KNpVujAL8
So you're saying MacWrite's beautiful graphical WYSIWYG layout is better than WordPerfect's cheap practical TOYOTA layout, which is a step up from WordStar's blocky brutalist CYBER TRUCK layout. ;)
I mean, look, WordStar was a huge step up from a typewriter. It (and programs like it) made it possible for people like me to write.
WordStar let you get the words right. WordPerfect let you do "you asked for it, you got it" layout, which was a step up. But MacWrite and programs like it let you do WYSIWYG layout, which was huge. It was like going from typewriter to WordStar, but for layout and appearance. (The words are still more important, but the presentation also matters.)