Retry, Fail, Abort

Guy trying to recover the early history of word processing as a tool for writing fiction:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/books/a-literary-history-of-word-processing.html?ref=arts&gwh=0CC71CE522D30E38A7A5881B3252EF9A 

His initial lecture on the topic was titled "Stephen King's Wang."  Funny.  I never had a Wang (this is getting worse) but I was a recipient of the largesse the Wang corporation could distribute as a result of the success of its "dedicated" word processors.  Wang sponsored a glorious literary festival in Toronto for a few years to which I was invited with practically every notable writer in the world from A.S. Byatt to Salman Rushdie.  My friend Norman Kottker did own one though, because of his advancing MS, and I wonder if the novel he typed on it preceded King's.  He was amazed at the ability it gave him to "micro-edit" as he said.  

Professor Kirschenbaum speaks of the early Microsoft Word and its users, but I hope he will take up WordPerfect, the real writer's software, the most flexible tool for writing on a computer ever developed.  Even now in decline better than Microsoft's WordBorg.   And XYWrite back in the DOS days was good too -- run entirely from the command line.

A big moment in word processing fiction was in "Stand By Me," when Stephen King at the end of writing the novel tyoed the last word and reached out to turn off the machine.  Many readers (no, viewers, this was the movie with Richard Dreyfuss at the keyboard) cried out "No! Save it! Save the work!"  Funny.