A word processor is a computer application used for the production (including composition, editing, formatting and possibly printing) of any sort of printable material.
Word processor may also refer to a type of stand-alone office machine, popular in the 1970s and 1980s, combining the keyboard text-entry and printing functions of anelectric typewriter with a dedicated processor (like a computer processor) for the editing of text.
History
The term word processing was invented by IBM in the late 1960s. By 1971 it was recognized by the New York Times as a "buzz word". A 1974 Times article referred to "the brave new world of Word Processing or W/P. That's International Business Machines talk... I.B.M. introduced W/P about five years ago for its Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter and other electronic razzle-dazzle.
IBM defined the term in a broad and vague way as "the combination of people, procedures, and equipment which transforms ideas into printed communications," and originally used it to include dictating machines and ordinary, manually operated Selectric typewriters. By the early seventies, however, the term was generally understood to mean semiautomated typewriters affording at least some form of electronic editing and correction, and the ability to produce perfect "originals." Thus, the Times headlined a 1974 Xerox product as a "speedier electronic typewriter", but went on to describe the product, which had no screen, as "a word processor rather than strictly a typewriter, in that it stores copy on magnetic tape or magnetic cards for retyping, corrections, and subsequent printout."
In the early 1970s IBM provided a program for generating printed documents on a mainframe computer, called FORMAT, and not described as a word processor. Input was normally onpunched cards, with 80 capital letters and non-alphabetic characters per card.
The limited typographical controls available were implemented by control sequences; for example, letters were automatically converted to lower case unless they followed a full stop or were preceded by a dollar sign. Output could be printed on a line printer, using a special capital-and-lower-case printer chain instead of the usual capitals-only one, or could be punched as a paper tape which could be printed, in better than line printer quality, on a Flexowriter. A workalike program with some improvements, DORMAT, was developed and used at University College London.
IBM defined the term in a broad and vague way as "the combination of people, procedures, and equipment which transforms ideas into printed communications," and originally used it to include dictating machines and ordinary, manually operated Selectric typewriters. By the early seventies, however, the term was generally understood to mean semiautomated typewriters affording at least some form of electronic editing and correction, and the ability to produce perfect "originals." Thus, the Times headlined a 1974 Xerox product as a "speedier electronic typewriter", but went on to describe the product, which had no screen, as "a word processor rather than strictly a typewriter, in that it stores copy on magnetic tape or magnetic cards for retyping, corrections, and subsequent printout."In the early 1970s IBM provided a program for generating printed documents on a mainframe computer, called FORMAT, and not described as a word processor. Input was normally onpunched cards, with 80 capital letters and non-alphabetic characters per card.
The limited typographical controls available were implemented by control sequences; for example, letters were automatically converted to lower case unless they followed a full stop or were preceded by a dollar sign. Output could be printed on a line printer, using a special capital-and-lower-case printer chain instead of the usual capitals-only one, or could be punched as a paper tape which could be printed, in better than line printer quality, on a Flexowriter. A workalike program with some improvements, DORMAT, was developed and used at University College London.
Electromechanical paper-tape-based equipment such as the Friden Flexowriter had long been available; the Flexowriter allowed for operations such as repetitive typing of form letters(with a pause for the operator to manually type in the variable information), and when equipped with an auxiliary reader, could perform an early version of "mail merge".
Circa 1970 it began to be feasible to apply electronic computers to office automation tasks. IBM's Mag Tape Selectric Typewriter (MTST) and later Mag Card Selectric (MCST) were early devices of this kind, which allowed editing, simple revision, and repetitive typing, with a one-line display for editing single lines.
