First Novel to be Written on a Word Processor

Alex

In 1968, novelist Len Deighton's personal assistant had a problem. She had to retype chapter drafts for his book in progress dozens of times over. Thankfully, IBM had something that could help:

A few weeks later, Deighton stood outside his Georgian terrace home and watched as workers removed a window so that a 200-pound unit could be hoisted inside with a crane. The machine was IBM’s MTST (Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter), sold in the European market as the MT72. “Standing in the leafy square in which I lived, watching all this activity, I had a moment of doubt,” the author, now 84, told me in a recent email. “I was beginning to think that I had chosen a rather unusual way to write books.”

Today, of course, many—surely most—fiction writers work with computers, laptops, and word processors just like the rest of us. Literary scholarship generally credits Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi with being the first manuscript submitted to a publisher in typewritten form. Would it be possible, I wondered when I began my research into the literary history of word processing a year and a half ago, to locate a corresponding first for the digital age? The answer turns out to be the book Deighton published in 1970 with the aid of the MTST: a curiously apropos novel about World War II, titled Bomber

Matthew Kirschenbaum of Slate has the story: Link


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I don't think I would call that a motherboard, just a generic printed circuit board. Companies (or one of their humorless departments) may be hesitant to stick random things on their circuit board where someone might see it, so while some are around, they aren't too common in my experience. Although there are collections around of images found on the actual silicon chips and integrated circuits, which normally would not be visible without destructively opening the plastic the chip is embedded in and then using a microscope to look at it.
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I was doing a little reverse engineering of a circuit board from Jack Deville - taking each component off and tracing the connections to get an idea how the board worked, and under the main chip was a message 'Concede Defeat, Retain Pride'. I can't imagine too many people would see that, but it made my day.
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