Expensive Typewriter

Last updated
A partially-shadowed paper tape at the Computer History Museum holds a copy of the Expensive Typewriter program binaries, ready for loading Programs Punched paper tapes in Computer History Museum - California.jpg
A partially-shadowed paper tape at the Computer History Museum holds a copy of the Expensive Typewriter program binaries, ready for loading

Expensive Typewriter was a pioneering text editor program that ran on the DEC PDP-1 computer, [1] which had been delivered to MIT in the early 1960s.

Contents

Description

Since the program could drive an IBM Selectric typewriter (a letter-quality printer), it may be considered the first word processing software. It was written and improved between 1961 and 1962 by Steve Piner and L. Peter Deutsch. In the spirit of an earlier editor program, named "Colossal Typewriter", it was called "Expensive Typewriter" because at that time the PDP-1 cost a lot of money (approximately US$ 100,000 in 1963, US$ 1,000,000 in 2024 dollars [2] ) as compared to a conventional manual typewriter. [3]

References

  1. ↑ "Expensive Typewriter" (manual) Archived 2016-03-04 at the Wayback Machine , August 1, 1972, MIT
  2. ↑ "CPI adjusted dollar calculator" . Retrieved Jan 12, 2026.
  3. ↑ "PDP-1 Price List". www.computerhistory.org. Retrieved June 17, 2022.

See also


This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.