Remembering the office of the future: The origins of word processing and office automation

IEEE Annals of the History of Computing

Volumn 28, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 6-31

  Haigh, Thomas ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MILWAUKEE   (United States)

Author keywords

1960s; 1970s; 1980s; Gender; History; History of computing; IBM; Office automation; Office management; PARC; Text processing; Vydec; Wang laboratories; Word processing; Xerox

Indexed keywords

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY; INTERACTIVE COMPUTER SYSTEMS; PERSONAL COMPUTERS; TEXT PROCESSING; WORD PROCESSING; XEROGRAPHY;

HISTORY OF COMPUTING; OFFICE MANAGEMENT;

OFFICE AUTOMATION;

EID: 33845871442     PISSN: 10586180     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1109/MAHC.2006.70     Document Type: Article

References (128)

1. According to material gathered by historian Martin Campbell-Kelly, by fall 1983, WordStar had sold 650,000 copies with a retail value of $325,000,000 while VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3, the two leading spreadsheets of this era, had 800,000 copies with a retail value of $225,000,000. M. Campbell-Kelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry, MIT Press, 2003, p. 215.
2. By 1996, word processors were outselling spreadsheets measured by volume as well as by value. M. Campbell-Kelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog, p. 270.
3. The parallel with data processing is explicitly made in W.A. Kleinschrod, "The 'Gal Friday' is a Typing Specialist Now," Administrative Management, vol. 32, no. 6, 1971, pp. 20-27.
4. The origins, usage, and spread of data processing are discussed in T. Haigh, "The Chromium-Plated Tabulator: Institutionalizing an Electronic Revolution, 1954-1958," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 23, no. 4, 2001, pp. 75-104.
5. U. Steinhilper, Don't Talk-Do It: From Flying to Word Processing, Independent Books, 2006. The quotation is from page 91. He wanted the diagram (p. 166) to be included on all the IBM folders used to hold sales proposals. Steinhilper wrote that he pushed the idea in various ways within IBM Germany and during a spell at IBM World Trade's European headquarters. He promoted it at a 1959 meeting of the IBM Hundred Percent club in Madrid (pp. 102-109). Exactly what word processing meant at that time is not clear - Steinhilper has written that the arrival of dictating equipment in the IBM product line in 1962 led him to redefine it as the process of "making a thought audible, visible and distributable." By the time the MT/ST arrived in 1964, he was Country Manager for Electric Typewriters, and promoted the Word Processing concept along with the machines (pp. 134-146). He began to promote the idea that customer firms should create a "Manager of Business Operations (Text)" of equal status to their existing data processing manager (p. 124).
6. The first mention of word processing in Administrative Management appears to have been in "Auburn U Learns about Word Processing," Administrative Management, vol. 31, no. 6, 1970, p. 81.
7. The longer feature on new developments in automatic typing - which included the quotation given, a two-page report on a meeting of the Word Processing Association of Arkansas, and an advertisement for a new automatic typewriter called the ITEL Word Processor - was J.G. Zalkind, "Automatic Typing Keys in New Advances," Administrative Management, vol. 31, no. 11, 1970, pp. 36-44. The prevalance of early adopters of the term in the southern US may imply that the regional IBM Office Products team led the way in promoting it.
8. W.A. Kleinshrod, Word Processing: An AMA Management Briefing, AMACOM, 1974.
9. Modern Office Procedures, a rival publication to Administrative Management, offered its first discussion of word processing a few months later in "A New Age of Automated Writing," Modern Office Procedures, vol. 16, no. 8, 1971, pp. 14-15.
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11. W.A. Kleinshrod, Word Processing, p. 3.
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14. International Business Machines, Office Products Division, "Are You Unconsciously Telling Your Boss You Can't Handle a Bigger Job?" Administrative Management, vol. 32, no. 6, 1971, pp. 30-31. Braverman discussed early word processing and its relationship to scientific management on pp. 344-348.
15. International Business Machines, IBM Office Products Division Highlights, 1976; http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/modelb/ modelb_office.html.
16. W.H. Liebman, "Super-Typewriters: The Word-Processing Industry Has Arrived," Barron's National Business and Financial Weekly, 31 March 1975.
17. For example, K.F. Curley, Word Processing: First Step to the Office of the Future, Praeger, 1983, pp. 45-49, defines no fewer than seven word processing product groups, three of which lacked video displays entirely or could display only a single line of text.
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19. R.R. Kay, "What We Found Out About Automatic Typing," Administrative Management, vol. 30, no. 11, 1969, pp. 32-34.
20. The automatic typing systems of the early 1970s are discussed in J.R. Cochran, "Automatic Typing and Text Editing Devices," Administrative Management, vol. 32, no. 6, 1971, pp. 44-50
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25. Leffingwell and the scientific office management movement, and its relationship to office technology, have been discussed in S. Strom, Beyond the Typewriter. Gender, Class and the Origins of Modern American Office Work, 1900-1930, Univ. Illinois Press, 1992
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27. and H. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century; Monthly Review Press, 1974.
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31. Reports in the general press began to challenge the connection between women's liberation and typing pools: For example, G. Dullea, "Is It a Boon for Secretaries - Or just an Automated Ghetto?" New York Times, 5 Feb. 1974.
32. Many paper tape systems, including teletype tape, actually had only five channels. However, coding schemes incorporate two "cases," originally special characters used to shift between letters mode and numbers mode, which effectively gave a total of 6 bits for each character. T. Jennings, ACSII: American Standard Code for Information Infiltration, 2004; http://www.wps.com/projects/codes/index.html.
33. ASCII is a 7-bit standard, though modern implementations are invariably 8-bit and fill the remaining positions with additional characters, including those required for other European languages. Lowercase letters were not officially defined in the initial 1963 version of the standard, but were added in 1967.
34. W.J. Hutchins, Machine Translation: Past, Present, Future, Halsted Press, 1986, section 4.3.
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36. R.E. Griswold, "A History of the SNOBOL Programming Languages," History of Programming Languages, R.L. Wexelblat, ed., Academic Press, 1981, pp. 601-644.
37. C.P. Bourne and T.B. Hahn, A History of Online Information Services: 1963-1976, MIT Press, 2003.
38. S. Levy, Hackers: The Heroes of the Digital Revolution, Anchor Press/ Doubleday, 1984.
39. J.M. Graetz, "The Origins of Spacewar," Creative Computing, Aug. 1981.
40. D.P.B. Smith, Type Justifying Program, 9 May 1963; http://www.dpbsmith.com/tj2.html. The online version includes annotation by D.P.B. Smith and a scan of the original memo describing the system.
41. J. McCarthy, "John McCarthy's 1959 Memorandum," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 14, no. 1, 1992, pp. 19-23.
42. F. Corbato, M. Merwin-Daggett, and R.C. Caley, "An Experimental Time-Sharing System," Proc. Spring Joint Computer Conf., vol. 21, AFIPS Press, 1962, pp. 335-344.
43. L.P. Deutsch and B.W. Lampson, "An Online Editor," Comm. ACM, vol. 10, no. 12, 1967, pp. 793-799.
44. A broad overview of the capabilities of the leading editors of this era is given in A. van Dam and D.E. Rice, "On-line Text Editing: A Survey," Computing Surveys, vol. 3, no. 3, 1971, pp. 93-114.
45. The widely used vi full-screen editor for Unix systems, produced by Bill Joy in 1976, included an alternative line editor interface, ex, having the same basic functionality. But from the mid-1970s on, full-screen editors were increasingly common on higher-end systems. To this day, Microsoft Windows includes the much despised EDLIN line editor, which was the only editor supplied with MS-DOS until the release of version 5.0 in 1991 even though DOS was designed from the beginning for use with video monitors.
46. The story of Emacs is discussed in R.M. Stallman, The Emacs Full-Screen Editor, 1987; http://www.lysator.liu.se/history/garb/txt/87-1-emacs.txt;
47. and S. Williams, Free as in Freedom, O'Reilly Press, 2002, chapter 6.
48. Thompson discussed his work on techniques to process regular expressions in K. Thompson, "Regular Expression Search Algorithm," Comm. ACM, vol. 11, no. 6, 1968, pp. 419-422.
49. The history of QED variants is recounted in D. Ritchie, An Incomplete History of the QED Text Editor, Bell Labs; http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/ who/dmr/qed.html.
50. B.K. Reid and D. Hanson, "An Annotated Bibliography of Background Material on Text Manipulation," ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Proc. ACM SIGPLAN SIGOA Symp. Text Manipulation, vol. 16, no. 6, 1981, pp. 157-160.
51. Use of the Unix tools for word processing was described in M. Krieger, Word Processing on the Unix System (A Byte Book), McGraw-Hill, 1985.
52. TeX is described in D.E. Knuth, The TeXbook (Computers and Typesetting, Volume A), Addison-Wesley, 1984.
53. "Time Sharing: An Update Report," Administrative Management, vol. 31, no. 3, 1970, pp. 20-22.
54. "Is T/S OK for WP?" Administrative Management, vol. 32, no. 6, 1971, p. 50.
55. W.H. Liebman, "Super-Typewriters: The Word-Processing Industry Has Arrived," Barron's National Business and Financial Weekly, 31 Mar. 1975.
56. One newspaper layout system is discussed in M.J. Spier et al., "The Typeset 10 Message Exchange Facility: A Case Study in Systemic Design," ACM SIGOPS Operating System Review, vol. 9, no. 1, 1974, pp. 10-18.
57. "Do-It-Yourself Phototypesetting," Business Week, 6 Sept. 1976, p. 56.
58. One early photocomposition system of technical publishing was presented in F.L. Alt and J.Y. Kirk, "Computer Photocomposition of Technical Text," Comm. ACM, vol. 16, no. 6, 1973, pp. 386-391.
59. R.A. Hendel, "Minicomputer Word Processing: A Two-Year Case History," Business Automation, vol. 19, no. 8, 1972, pp. 35-37.
60. A more general discussion of minicomputers and word processing was given in J.R. Hanse, "Minis Impact Word-Processing," Infosystems, vol. 23, no. 11, 1976, pp. 58.
61. DEC itself eventually recognized the potential of word processing as a major application for its minicomputers, and in 1977 launched specialized word processing systems that could be used independently (when configured with disks and a printer) or as "intelligent terminals" for word processing and other tasks when connected to a PDP-11 minicomputer. International Data Corporation (IDC), "Major Vendor Strategies in the Electronic Office - Part I," Market and Product Reports Collection (CBI 55), Charles Babbage Inst., Univ. of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Nov. 1983.
62. "DEC Merges Word and Data Processing," Business Week, 6 June 1977, p. 94C.
63. K.F. Curley, Word Processing: First Step to the Office of the Future, Praeger, 1983, p. 44.
64. Lexitron was founded in 1970 by "boy genius" Stephen Kurtin and went public in 1972, according to W.H. Liebman, "Super-Typewriters: The Word-Processing Industry Has Arrived," Barron's National Business and Financial Weekly, 31 Mar. 1975.
65. The Lexitron is a rather obscure machine, and fits the description of a machine first advertised and reported in Administrative Management in June 1971 as the "Editron" by a company called Word Processing Products Inc. Lexitron Corp. ran into problems and was purchased by Raytheon in 1978, but despite finally launching a floppy-disk-based word processor that year, it continued to struggle. "The Cautious Comeback of a Onetime Word Processing Champ," Business Week, 5 May 1980, p. 118E.
66. "Vydec Finds it Helps to have Exxon's Backing," Business Week, 21 Nov. 1977, p. 102D.
67. The price given is for 1977. Vydec is also discussed in K.F. Curley, Word Processing: First Step to the Office of the Future, p. 44.
68. W.H. Liebman, "Super-Typewriters: The Word-Processing Industry Has Arrived," Barron's National Business and Financial Weekly, 31 Mar. 1975.
69. "Why Qume Shot Ahead in Electronic Printers," Business Week, 13 June 1977, p. 42J.
70. "A Computer That's Geared to Small Business," Business Week, 21 Apr. 1975, p. 122D.
71. Each of these represented a bundling of its existing 2200 series processor, first sold in 1973, with a video terminal and hard disk (model 30), floppy disk (model 20) or tape (model 10) storage. See http://www.thebattles.net/wang/models.html#prehistory.
72. Good technical information on Wang's early word processors is hard to come by. The original brochure announcing the Word Processing system is available online at Wang Labs, Wang. The Last Word in Word Processing, 1976; http://www.harolds928people.org/images/wpbroch.htm.
73. Howard Koplow, who led development of the Word Processor family, takes credit for persuading An Wang that microprocessors should be used to create the Model 30 file server, rather than waiting for the completion of the VS series of minicomputers then under development. H. Koplow, Harold's 920 People-Harold Koplow; http://www.harolds928people.org/ people/koplow.htm.
74. Wang Labs, Wang. The Last Word in Word Processing, 1976; http://www.harolds928people.org/images/wpbroch.htm.
75. A. Wang and E. Linden, Lessons: An Autobiography, Addison-Wesley, 1986, p. 178.
76. J. Zygmont, "Look Who Shrunk the Computer," Boston Globe Magazine, 29 Dec. 2002, p. 24.
77. "A Bold Lanier Takes Another Shot at IBM," Business Week, 21 Nov. 1977, p. 102H.
78. "A Brash Lanier Makes its Move," Business Week, 9 Oct. 1979, p. 102H.
79. "Lanier Aims to Win Back its Office Leadership," Business Week, 16 May 1983, p. 133.
80. "IBM Enters the 'Office of the Future,'" Business Week, 14 Feb. 1976, p. 133.
81. International Business Machines, IBM Office Products Division Highlights, 1976; http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/modelb/ modelb_office.html.
82. "IBM's Office of the Future Entry," Business Week, 19 Nov. 1979, p. 150G.
83. "When IBM is a Low-Priced Entry," Business Week, 7 July 1980, p. 82B. A more powerful IBM product, the 5520 Information System, was a competitor for Wang's Office Information System. It networked up to 18 terminals to share files on a hard disk drive and a higher speed printer.
84. "Wang's Game Plan for the Office," Business Week, 15 Dec. 1980, p. 84.
85. T.M. Lodahl, "Designing the Automated Office: Organizational Functions of Data and Text," Emerging Office Systems, R.M. Landau, ed., Ablex, 1982, pp. 59-72.
86. "Putting the Office in Place," Business Week, 30 June 1975, p. 56.
87. The problems involved in centralized word processing pools were subsequently discussed widely: For example, in B. Garson, The Electronic Sweatshop: How Computers are Transforming the Office of the Future into the Factory of the Past, Simon and Schuster, 1988.
88. K.F. Curley, Word Processing: First Step to the Office of the Future, pp. 47-48.
89. J. Harnett, "Demand for More Advanced Facilities - Word Processing and the New Generation of Secretarial Workstations" Financial Times, 1989, Survey p. IV.
90. "Here Comes the Automated Office!" Infosystems, vol. 22, no. 9, 1975, pp. 13-15, 24
91. and "The Paths to the Paperless Office," Business Week, 30 June 1975, p. 80.
92. In the 1950s, the phrase "office automation" featured prominently in discussions of administrative computing such as Automation in the Office, Nat'l Office Management Assoc., 1957
93. and A.N. Seares, "Advancements in Office Automation," The Hopper, vol. 4, no. 2, 1953, pp. 6-9.
94. There may be another, more pragmatic reason for the vanishing of the term office automation: The phrase was trademarked by Automation Associates, a small firm founded by R. Hunt Brown that issued a series of glossy "Office Automation Reports" on administrative computing technologies from 1955 onward. R.H. Brown, "Office Automation: A Handbook on Automatic Data Processing," 1959, Market and Product Reports Collection (CBI 55), Charles Babbage Inst., Univ. of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
95. The history of the management information system concept is explored in T. Haigh, "Inventing Information Systems: The Systems Men and the Computer, 1950-1968," Business History Rev., vol. 75, no. 1, 2001, pp. 15-61.
96. "The Paths to the Paperless Office," Business Week, 30 June 1975, p. 80.
97. Engelbart's story has been recounted in many places, but the only full-length study of his group is T. Bardini, Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing, Stanford Univ. Press, 2000.
98. No transcript of the demonstration has been published. The quotation is based on the video recording hosted by Stanford University's "Mouse Site" (http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/MouseSitePg1.html). Rather inconveniently, this is broken into 35 tiny pieces of streaming video - at the time of writing the appropriate one may be found at http://vodreal.stanford.edu/engel/05enge1200.ram.
99. M. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age, HarperBusiness, 1999, pp. 121-124.
100. B. Lampson, "Personal Distributed Computing: The Alto and Ethernet Software," Proc. ACM Conference on the History of Personal Workstations, ACM Press, 1986, pp. 101-131. Another PARC editor, Gypsy, developed by Larry Tesler, simplified the user interface through the elimination of different command modes and the use of the mouse to cut and paste text. This improved interface style was subsequently used in an improved version of Bravo, named BravoX. Like NLS, the original Bravo responded quite differently to a given user action depending on which of many command modes had been selected. With BravoX, an action like typing a word or selecting text with the mouse would have a consistent outcome whatever commands had been used previously. This made it much easier for non-specialist users to work with the program.
101. K.F. Curley, Word Processing: First Step to the Office of the Future, p. 109.
102. Curley's book appears to be a lightly edited version of her 1981 Harvard Business School thesis, and although the book does not specify when the survey was conducted, internal evidence suggests a date around 1979. For another study with similar findings and a comparable definition of the "highest level" of word processor use as being for "systemwide reinvention," see B.M. Johnson and R.E. Rice, "Reinvention in the Innovation Process: The Case of Word Processing," The New Media: Communication, Research and Technology, R.E. Rice, ed., Sage Publications, 1984, pp. 157-183.
103. The efforts of Xerox to commercialize Alto technology receive their most thorough discussion in M. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age, HarperBusiness, 1999, pp. 259-288 and 361-370.
104. International Data Corporation (IDC), "Major Vendor Strategies in the Electronic Office - Part I," Market and Product Reports Collection (CBI 55), Charles Babbage Inst., Univ. of Minnesota, Nov. 1983.
105. Technical data on the specifications of various OIS models is given at J. Donoghu, Wang OIS Information Center, http://www.cass.net/~jdonoghu/. The first OIS file server unit was apparently a rebadged Word Processor 30 model.
106. V. Flanders, "Wang's Integrated Products: Past, Present and Future," Access 86: The Magazine for Wang System Users, Dec. 1986, p. 33.
107. "Wang Labs Challenges the Goliaths," Business Week, 4 June 1979, p. 100.
108. S.T. McClellan, The Coming Computer Industry Shakeout: Winners, Losers, and Survivors, John Wiley & Sons, 1984, pp. 299-303.
109. S. Lohr, "Exxon Said to Lag in Office Machines: But Company Calls Problems Growing," New York Times, 12 Aug. 1980, p. D1.
110. Exxon's office automation foray lost hundreds of millions of dollars, and never succeeded in integrating its product lines before being wound down from 1983 onward. "Exxon Wants Out of the Automated Office," Business Week, 17 Dec. 1984, p. 39.
111. R.M. Dickinson, "Can Centralized Planning for Office Automation Ever Work in a Large Corporation?" Emerging Office Systems, R. Landau, J. Bair, and J. Siegman, eds., Ablex, 1982, pp. 21-38.
112. The idea that "the cost figures for secretarial services compared with management and professional services suggest, however, that it is in these areas the real benefits lie," was also expressed in Xephon Technology Transfer, "Office Automation: An IBM User Perspective," Gartner Group, Market and Product Reports Collection (CBI 55), Charles Babbage Inst., Univ. of Minnesota, Feb. 1982.
113. Processed World Web site, 15 June 2006; http://www.processedworld.com.
114. B. Garson, The Electronic Sweatshop: How Computers are Transforming the Office of the Future into the Factory of the Past, Simon and Schuster, 1988
115. and S. Zuboff, In The Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power, Basic Books, 1988.
116. voluminous academic literature appeared on the impact of the new technology on the organization of office work, a good review of which is presented in M.C. Murphree, "New Technology and Office Tradition: The Not-So-Changing World of the Secretary," Computer Chips and Paper Clips: Technology and Women's Employment, Volume II: Case Studies and Policy Perspectives, Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, ed., 1987, pp. 98-135.
117. A brief discussion of the early market for word processing software is given in M. Campbell-Kelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedge-hog, pp. 217-219.
118. M. Shrayer, The Electric Pencil Word Processor Operator's Manual, TheBattles.net, 1977; http://www.thebattles.net/sol20/manuals/pencil.pdf.
119. The history of Electric Pencil is discussed in P. Freiberger and M. Swaine, Fire in the Valley. The Making of the Personal Computer, 2nd ed., McGraw-Hill, 2000, pp. 186-188.
120. P.A. McWilliams, The Word Processing Book: A Short Course in Computer Literacy, 5th ed., Prelude Press, 1983, p. 211.
121. Even in 1983, turning an Apple II into a machine capable of running WordStar well remained a tortuous process, costing several thousand dollars in addition to the price of a printer. See J. Mar, "Word Processing on the Apple with WordStar and Diablo," Creative Computing, vol. 9, no. 3, 1983, p. 81.
122. A. Naiman, Word Processing Buyer's Guide, BYTE/McGraw-Hill, 1983, p. 177.
123. Ibid., p. 81.
124. C. Platt and D. Langford, Micromania: The Whole Truth about Personal Computers, Sphere, 1984, p. 120.
125. A. Naiman, Word Processing Buyer's Guide, p. 91.
126. The first version of WordPerfect was called SSI*WP, but was otherwise similar to the version launched for the IBM/PC in 1982. Its origins are explained in W.E. Peterson, Almost Perfect, Prima, 1994.
127. For an early review of the product, see L.L. Beavers, "WordPerfect: Not Quite Perfect, But Certainly Superb," Creative Computing, vol. 9, no. 11, 1983, p. 74. WordPerfect eventually supported a broad range of platforms, including DEC minicomputers and even IBM mainframes.
128. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2006-07 Edition: Data Entry and Information Processing Workers, US Dept. Labor, 4 Aug. 2006; http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos155.htm.