A Brief History of Word Processing
(Through 1986)
by Brian Kunde

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Note: This paper was written in December, 1986 for a CIS 50 - Sec. 61 class at Foothill College, Los Altos Hills, California. It reflects the industry situation of that time, and should not be used either as a guide to current industry standards or to the present state of the art.

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Contents:

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[Text] [Appendix A] [Appendix B] [Notes] [Bibliography]

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Word processing did not develop out of computer technology. It evolved from the needs of writers rather than those of mathemeticians, only later merging with the computer field.¹ The history of word processing is the story of the gradual automation of the physical aspects of writing and editing, and the refinement of the technology to make it available to individual and corporate users.
The invention of printing and moveable type at the end of the Middle Ages² was the initial step in this automation. But the first major advance from manual writing as far as the individual was concerned was the typewriter. Henry Mill, an English engineer of the early eighteenth century, is credited with its invention. The fact that almost nothing is known about his early version today is evidence of its lack of success.³
Christopher Latham Sholes, with the assistance of two colleagues, invented the first successful manual typewriter in 1867. It began to be marketed commercially in 1874, rather improbably by a gun manufacturing company, E. Remington and Sons.⁴ The main drawback of this model was that it printed on the underside of the roller, so that the typist could not view his work until he had finished.⁵
Acceptance of the typewriter was slow at first, but was facilitated over the next several years by various improvements. These included: the shift key, which made it possible to type both capital and lower-case letters with the same keys (1878); printing on the upper side of the roller (1880); and the tab key, permitting the setting of margins (1897).⁶
Eventually, at first in the corporate sector, the typewriter began to catch on. Businesses, which had hitherto had their records and correspondence written and copied by hand, found their paperwork could be done more quickly and legibly on the typewriter.⁷ Typewriting was put within the reach of individuals by the development of portable models, first marketed in the early 1900s.⁸
Thomas Edison patented an electric typewriter in 1872, but the first workable model was not introduced until the 1920s. In the 1930s IBM introduced a more refined version, the IBM Electromatic.⁹ It 'greatly increased typing speeds and quickly gained wide acceptance in the business community.'¹⁰
This was soon followed by the M. Shultz Company's introduction of the automatic or repetitive typewriter, perhaps the greatest step from the typewriter towards modern word processing. The Shultz machine's main innovation was automatic storage of information for later retrieval. It was a sort of 'player typewriter,' punch-coding text onto paper rolls similar to those used in player pianos, which could later be used to activate the keys of the typewriter in the same order as the initial typing. ¹¹ With the automatic typewriter, it was possible to produce multiple typed copies of form letters identical in appearance to the hand-typed original, without the intermediary of carbons, photocopiers or typesetting.
The bulky paper roll machine was succeeded by a device called the Flexowriter, which used paper tape. This had a key that allowed the deletion of mistakes from the tape and copies by punching a 'non-print' code over the code for the character erroniously typed. Long passages of text could be deleted or moved by literally cutting the tape and pasting it back together.¹²
In 1961 IBM introduced the Selectric typewriter, which replaced the standard movable carriage and individual typestrikers with a revolving typeball (often refered to as a 'golfball' or 'walnut'). This could print faster than the traditional typewriter.¹³.
In 1964 IBM brought out the MT/ST (Magnetic Tape/Selectric Typewriter), which combined the features of the Selectric with a magnetic tape drive. Magnetic tape was the first reusable storage medium for typed information.¹⁴ With this, for the first time, typed material could be edited without having to retype the whole text or chop up a coded copy. On the tape, information could be stored, replayed (that is, retyped automatically from the stored information), corrected, reprinted as many times as needed, and then erased and reused for other projects. This development marked the beginning of word processing as it is known today.¹⁵
It also introduced word processing as a definite idea and concept. The term was first used in IBM's marketing of the MT/ST as a 'word processing' machine.¹⁶. It was a translation of the German word textverabeitung, coined in the late 1950s by Ulrich Steinhilper, an IBM engineer. He used it as a more precise term for what was done by the act of typing.¹⁷ IBM redefined it 'to describe electronic ways of handling a standard set of office activities — composing, revising, printing, and filing written documents.'¹⁸
Since the invention of the MT/ST, advances in technology have made word processing systems less expensive to produce, leading to intensified competition among developers and an increase in the development rate of new packages.¹⁹
In 1969 IBM introduced MagCards, magnetic cards that were slipped into a box attached to the typewriter and recorded text as it was typed on paper. The cards could then be used to recall and reprint text. These were useful mostly to companies which sent out large numbers of form letters. However, only about one page-worth of text could be stored on each card.²⁰
In 1972 Lexitron and Linolex developed a similar word processing system, but included video display screens and tape cassettes for storage. With the screen, text could be entered and corrected without having to produce a hard copy. Printing could be delayed until the writer was satisfied with the material.²¹
The floppy disk marked a new stage in the evolution of storage media. Developed by IBM in the early 1970s for use in data processing (that is, traditional number computation), it was soon adopted by the word processing industry.²² Vydec, in 1973, seems to have been the first manufacturer to produce a word processing system using floppy disks for storage. Previous storage media could only hold one or two pages of text, but the early disks were capable of holding 80 to 100 pages. This increased storage capacity permitted the creation and easy editing of multipage documents without the necessity of changing storage receptacles.²³
Floppy disks could also be used to hold programs. The most important advance in word processing was the change from 'hard wired' instructions built into the machinery to software on disks. When the programs were part of the equipment they were difficult to change and expensive to upgrade. Programs on disks could be updated more economically, since a rewritten program could be loaded into and used with the same hardware as the old one.²⁴
Before disk programs most word processing packages were 'dedicated' systems, which were bulky and expensive, and did not admit computing functions other than word processing.²⁵ Disk programs made it practical to develop packages for use with personal computers, first made available in completely assembled form in 1977.²⁶ Thus the separation of the software from the hardware also opened up the field to individuals. Word processing is now 'one of the most common general applications for personal computers.'²⁷
Over the next ten years many new features were introduced in the field. One important innovation was the development of spelling check and mailing list programs.²⁸ Another advance, introduced by Xerox in its Star Information System, allowed working on more than one document at a time on the same screen.²⁹
Some programs now even incorporate bookkeeping and inventory functions, combining word processing with data processing and completing the marriage of the word processor to the computer.³⁰ The combined field is known as information processing.³¹
The introduction and evolution of the specific word processing programs available today is not covered well in the literature. Authors seem to assume that their readers will automatically be familiar with recent developments, despite the fact that if they were they would not be buying the literature. WordStar, put out by Micropro International, has emerged as the industry standard in software packages, though others surpass it in one feature or another.³²
There are now more than sixty complete word processing systems on the market, and more than thirty software packages for use with various computers,* all with different capabilities and claims about their efficiency. These are listed in Appendix A. It was not possible to describe all their features without turning the appendix into a book; however, such descriptions may be found in the sources from which the list was compiled (see the notes). To partially remedy this lack, a list of features standard in most current word processing programs has been provided in Appendix B.

*The totals given here probably vastly underestimate the number actually available. [Back to Text]

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Appendix A: Currently Available
Word Processing Systems and Software.

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1. Complete Systems³³:

Note: dedicated systems are starred (*).

A. Available in Both Stand-Alone and Multiterminal Versions.

B. Available in Stand-Alone Version Only.

C. Available in Multiterminal Version Only.

D. Phototypesetters and Other Non-Standard Systems.

2. Software Packages³⁴:

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Appendix B: A List of Features Standard in
Most Current Word Processing Programs³⁵.

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• Wordwrap: automatic arrangement of text in lines of specified length without the necessity of touching the return key.
• Discretionary Hyphenation: option of inserting a hyphen to break a word that ends a line: the hyphen does not print if later editing moves the word to the middle of a line.
• Justification: automatic alignment of text to both the left and right margins.
• Adjustment: realignment of text to new margin and tab settings.
• Alignment: positioning text or numbers to specified margin and tab settings.
• Decimal Alignment: positioning columns of numbers with the decimal points vertically aligned.
• Indents: the setting of temporary margins within a document differing from the primary margins used.
• Centering text on a line.
• Insertion: the entry of new text within previously typed material without erasing the existing material.
• Overstriking: the substitution of new text for old by typing over the old text.
• Deletion: erasure of text from the screen, or of whole documents from the disk.
• Search and Replace: moving directly to specified words or parts of words within a document and replacing them with different words or word portions.
• Copying or Cutting: the duplication or moving of blocks of text within a document.
• Boilerplate: the separate storage and retrieval of blocks of text from which standard documents can be built.
• Pagination: automatic division of a document into pages of specified numbers of lines.
• Page Numbering: automatic sequential numbering of pages.
• Headers and Footers: option of creating standard blocks of text that will automatically appear at the top or bottom of each page in a document.
• Footnoting: automatic sequential numbering of footnotes and positioning of the footnotes at the bottom of their appropriate pages during pagination.
• Table of Contents and Index Generators. Programs that create these based on the text of a document.
• Form Letter Merging: automatic combining of a form letter with a mailing list to generate multiple copies of the letter with the different addresses and other variable information filled in.
• Automatic Spelling Checker and Corrector. Program that compares words in the text against an on-line dictionary, flagging items not found in the dictionary and offering alternative spellings and a means of correcting the errors.

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Notes:

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Note: see bibliography for full information on sources cited.

1. Price & Urban, page xxiii. [Back to text.]
2. Munday, page 4. [Back to text.]
3. Munday, page 4. [Back to text.]
4. Munday, pages 4-5, and Price & Urban, page xxi. [Back to text.]
5. Munday, page 5. [Back to text.]
6. Munday, page 5. [Back to text.]
7. Price & Urban, page xxi. [Back to text.]
8. Munday, page 5. [Back to text.]
9. Munday, page 6, and Price & Urban, page xxi. [Back to text.]
10. Munday, page 6. [Back to text.]
11. Munday, page 6, and Price & Urban, page xxi. [Back to text.]
12. Flores, pages 8-9, and Price & Urban, page xxi. [Back to text.]
13. Munday, page 6. [Back to text.]
14. Flores, page 11, Munday, pages 6-7, and Price & Urban, page xxi. [Back to text.]
15. Munday, pages 6-7, and Price & Urban, page xxi. [Back to text.]
16. Blissmer, page 66, and Munday, page 7. [Back to text.]
17. Munday, page 7. [Back to text.]
18. Blissmer, page 66. [Back to text.]
19. Munday, page 9, and Price & Urban, page xxii. [Back to text.]
20. Flores, page 12, and Price & Urban, page xxi. [Back to text.]
21. Flores, pages 12-13, and Price & Urban, page xxii. [Back to text.]
22. Flores, page 12. [Back to text.]
23. Price & Urban, page xxii. [Back to text.]
24. Munday, page 9, and Price & Urban, page xxii. [Back to text.]
25. Blissmer, page 66, and Price & Urban, page 458. [Back to text.]
26. Blissmer, page 427. [Back to text.]
27. Blissmer, page 438. [Back to text.]
28. Blissmer, page 438. [Back to text.]
29. Price & Urban, page xxiii. [Back to text.]
30. Price & Urban, page xxiv. [Back to text.]
31. Price & Urban, pages 120 and 466. [Back to text.]
32. McWilliams, page 167, and Marshak, page 137. [Back to text.]
33. Price & Urban, pages 274-402. [Back to text.]
34. McWilliams, pages 167-170, Marshak, pages 184-193, and Price & Urban, pages 403-433. [Back to text.]
35. Marshak, pages 194-198. [Back to text.]

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Annotated Bibliography:

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Note: Only book sources were used. I anticipated getting a lot of information out of computer journals, but they were poorly covered in the indexes.

1. Blissmer, Robert H. Computer Annual: An Introduction to Information Systems 1985-1986. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1985. Treatment of word processing is limited, since this book covers the whole computer field, but it gives a few items of information I did not find elsewhere. Contains an interesting chronology of 'The Evolution of Computer Systems,' illustrated with photographs.
2. Flores, Ivan. Word Processing Handbook. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1983. Deals mainly with the technology of word processing, explaining how the systems work and how to use them. A subsection of the introduction, 'The Evolution of Word Processing,' covers the history of the field from the same technical viewpoint. Its description of the development of the technology and what each system did is lucid and well illustrated with diagrams. Flores is weak on the dates the systems appeared and the names of their developers.
3. Marshak, Ronni T. Word Processing Software for the IBM PC. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1985. A good overview of currently available word processing programs that can be used with the IBM personal computer, with ratings of each and comparisons of their features and prices.
4. McWilliams, Peter A. Word Processing on the KayPro: A Special Edition of The Word Processing Book For Owners and Prospective Owners of the KayPro II, 4 or 10. Los Angeles: Prelude Press, 1983. Includes a section entitled 'A Brief and No Doubt Inaccurate History of Word Processing.' If McWilliams had only added 'useless' to the title of the section he would have summed it up exactly. There is some actual history in the book, but rather than put it in the history section McWilliams has thoughtfully spread it throughout the text so you can't find it.
5. Munday, Marianne Forrester. Oportunities in Word Processing. Lincolnwood, Illinois: National Textbook Company, 1985. Includes a short chapter entitled 'History and Development of Word Processing,' the best discussion of the subject I found. Gives little on the evolution of specific software systems.
6. Price, Jonathan, and Urban, Linda Pinneau. The Definitive Word-Processing Book. New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1984. Includes a brief history of word processing in the introduction, comparable to the one in the Munday book, although shorter and generally less exact in the information given. Weak on developments since 1973. Gives little on the evolution of specific software systems. Includes an appendix similar in nature to the Marshak book, not as well organized, but covering the whole range of word processing systems rather than just those usable with the IBM PC.

—BPK, 12/13/86, rv.3/12/98.

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A Brief History of Word Processing (Through 1986)

1st web edition posted 2/14/1996
(updated 5/27/1997).
2nd web edition posted 3/12/1998
(updated 5/15/2008).

Published by Fleabonnet Press.
© 1986-2008 by Brian Kunde.

The history of cyber security began with a research project. A man named Bob Thomas realized that it was possible for a computer program to move across a network, leaving a small trail wherever it went. He named the program Creeper, and designed it to travel between Tenex terminals on the early ARPANET, printing the message “I’M THE CREEPER: CATCH ME IF YOU CAN.”

A man named Ray Tomlinson (yes, the same guy who invented email) saw this idea and liked it. He tinkered with the program and made it self-replicating—the first computer worm. Then he wrote another program—Reaper, the first antivirus software—which would chase Creeper and delete it.

It’s funny to look back from where we are now, in an era ofransomware,fileless malware, andnation-state attacks, and realize that the antecedents to this problem were less harmful than simple graffiti. How did we get from there to here?

From an Academic Beginning, a Quick Turn to Criminality

First of all, let’s be clear—for much of the 70s and 80s, threats to computer security were clear and present. But, these threats were in the form of malicious insiders reading documents they shouldn’t. The practice of computer security revolving around governance risk and compliance (GRC) therefore evolved separately from the history of computer security software. (Anyone remember the Orange Books?)

Network breaches and malware did exist and were used for malicious ends during the early history of computers, however. The Russians, for example, quickly began to deploy cyberpower as a weapon. In 1986, the German computer hacker Marcus Hess hacked an internet gateway in Berkeley, and used that connection to piggyback on the Arpanet. He hacked 400 military computers, including mainframes at the Pentagon, with the intent of selling their secrets to the KGB. He was only caught when an astronomer namedClifford Stoll detected the intrusion and deployed a honeypot technique.

At this point in the history of cyber security, computer viruses began to become less of an academic prank, and more of a serious threat. Increasing network connectivity meant that viruses like the Morris worm nearly wiped out the early internet, which began to spur the creation of the first antivirus software.

History of Cyber Security: The Morris Worm, and the Viral Era

Late in 1988, a man named Robert Morris had an idea: he wanted to gauge the size of the internet. To do this, he wrote a program designed to propagate across networks, infiltrate Unix terminals using a known bug, and then copy itself. This last instruction proved to be a mistake.The Morris worm replicated so aggressively that the early internet slowed to a crawl, causing untold damage.

Early Mac Program Hacking Tools 1986 Youtube

The worm had effects that lasted beyond an internet slowdown. For one thing, Robert Morris became the first person successfully charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (although this ended happily for him—he’s currentlya tenured professor at MIT). More importantly, this act also led to the formation of theComputer Emergency Response Team (the precursor to US-CERT), which functions as a nonprofit research center for systemic issues that might affect the internet as a whole.

The Morris worm appears to have been the start of something. After the Morris worm, viruses started getting deadlier and deadlier, affecting more and more systems. It seems as though the worm presaged the era of massive internet outages in which we live. You also began to see the rise of antivirus as a commodity—1987 saw the release of the first dedicated antivirus company.

The Morris worm also brought with it one last irony. The worm took advantage of the sendmail function in Unix, which was related to the email function originally created by Ray Tomlinson. In other words, the world’s first famous virus took at advantage of the first virus author’s most famous creation.

The Rise of the AV Industry

A trickle of security solutions began appearing in the late 80s but the early 90s saw an explosion of companies offering AV scanners. These products scanned all the binaries on a given system and tested them against a database of “signatures”. These were initially just computed hashes of the file, but later they also involved searching for a list of strings typically found in the malware.

These early attempts at solving the malware problem were beset with two crucial problems that were never entirely solved: false positives and intensive resource use, with the latter being a major cause of user frustration as the AV scanner often interfered with user productivity.

At the same time, the number of malware samples being produced exploded. From a few tens of thousands of known samples in the early 90s, the figure reached around 5 million new samples every year by 2007. By 2014, it was estimated that around 500,000 unique malware samples were being produced every day. The (by now) legacy AV solutions were swamped: they simply couldn’t write signatures fast enough to keep up with the problem. A new approach was needed.

Endpoint Protection Platforms were the next step. Instead of relying on static signatures to identify viruses, they introduced the use of signatures scanning for “malware families”. The fact that most malware samples are a deviation of existing samples worked well for EPP solutions, as they were able to prove to customers they could prevent the “unknown”, which was in fact detections based on existing malware that their signatures could recognize.

EternalBlue: Lateral Movement Comes to Play

Lateral movement techniques are ways for attackers to issue commands, run code and spread across the network. These are not new to most sysadmins, but thanks to a leak of NSA hacking tools, it turns out that some operating system protocols have had vulnerabilities in them for many years that allow attackers to achieve stealthy lateral movement. One notable example is what we now know as “EternalBlue”.

EternalBlue exploits the SMB protocol used for file sharing over the network. This makes the protocol highly attractive to adversaries. EternalBlue was leaked by the Shadow Brokers hacker group on April 14, 2017, and was used as part of the worldwide WannaCry ransomware attack on May 12, 2017. The exploit was also used to help carry out the 2017 NotPetya cyberattack on June 27, 2017 and reportedly is used as part of the Retefe banking trojan since at least September 5, 2017. No Anti-Virus or even next generation EPP can effectively prevent exploitation using EternalBlue.

Fileless malware and system vulnerabilities are just two of a number of common ways that attackers can bypass traditional antivirus (and also more than a few “next-gen” endpoint solutions). So if your company reputation is on the line and you can’t guarantee protection, what can you do? That’s right. You find ways to make sure you are aware of what’s going on with your assets. The new name of the game is Detection.

How Attacks Are Seen Today

It didn’t take long for adversaries to figure out how to defeat EPP solutions. Fileless malware leveraging built-in tools like VBScript, PowerShell, Office Macros and DDE attack can easily avoid signature-based EPP solutions. This was proved with devastating effect by WannaCry.

It’s hard to recall a bigger shock to the IT community than WannaCry, “the biggest ransomware offensive in history.” Within 24 hours, WannaCry had infected more than 230,000 computers in over 150 countries.

From a technical point-of-view, it was not particularly sophisticated. In fact, it exploited a vulnerability that had been known for 91 days and that had already been patched by Microsoft.

Even so, an estimated 1.3 billion endpoints were eventually infected. In the UK, the National Health Service – a major client for Sophos – had to cancel 20,000 appointments and operations due to the ransomware. Whether any lives were lost as a result of it will never be known, but what is known is that it crippled the country’s health service.

WannaCry is the most famous, but hardly the only case. We see on a regular basis how attackers are finding new ways to compromise devices. A few more examples:

From Prevention to Detection: EDR Was Born

Back in the day (and to some extent even today), companies hired Incident Response teams to come in and investigate security breaches. In 2013, the most reliable among these was Mandiant. They offered security professionals that were always ready to jump in and find out what had happened. And they were not cheap.

In parallel, some more technical enterprises had begun to invest in visibility tools like Facebook’s osquery and other ways to see into networks. That opened up a new category for the overcrowded market of cybersecurity, and many new solutions were created as a result. Gartner’s Anton Chuvakin coined the term “EDR” to describe this family of new tools focused on visibility.

With that revolution, the inherent problems of EDR solutions started raising their heads.
Enterprises needed a highly skilled crew to manage these solutions as they provide so much data, and most of that lacked any context. Enterprises found themselves hiring more and more bodies to solve this problem, but the past couple of years have seen barely a month go by without the news headline of yet another high-profile data breach.

The other critical problem in the area of EDR revolves around “dwell time”. Dwell time represents the time from the infection to the discovery of the malicious activity. Some have suggested an average 90 days dwell time – hardly acceptable to any enterprise – and more recently some products claim they can reduce dwell time to a matter of minutes. Putting aside how reliable self-made claims like these might be for a moment, even 10 seconds is much too long: attackers can run their code, execute their attack, and wrap it up and clean themselves out in a matter of just a few seconds. Any solution that is not detecting in real time is too late in the game.

Protect Yourself from Modern-Day Viruses with SentinelOne

Viruses have come a long way since the invention of the Morris worm—and the Russian hackers have honed their skills since the days of Marcus Hess. To counter these modern threats, companies need future-proof protection, and that’s where SentinelOne comes in.

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At machine speed, SentinelOne’s ActiveEDR is able to prevent, detect, and respond to advanced attacks regardless of delivery vectors, whether the endpoint is connected to the cloud or not. The SentinelOne solution can provide a security team, small or large, regardless of skill level, with the context to not only understand what is found, but to autonomously block attacks in real time.

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