Today in Tedium: I’m writing these opening lines in Markdown, using a Mac app called Focused, one of many attempts to rethink the word processor as a minimalist exercise. Every one of my articles starts out in this app (or at least in John Gruber’s neglected gift to the world), and yet, I always find myself looking for another option, periodically launching into a Google deep dive that rarely leads to a better solution. I always feel like my words deserve a better vessel, something that will allow me to write them faster, more efficiently, and with as little friction as possible. Since I started writing as a career, I’ve always preferred my writing tools to have a certain style—I want them as little like Microsoft Word as possible. I’m willing to crack the bones of a rich-text editor to bend it to my will. But I’ve never done a look through the tea leaves of early word processors—in a hunt to figure out what we’ve thrown out that’s actually useful. That’s where I’m going in today’s Tedium. My word-processor obsession knows no bounds. — Ernie @ Tedium
— Thomas Haigh, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, noting an interesting parallel between the word processor and a common device you’ve probably seen in your kitchen. Decades before Microsoft Word first hit the scene, word processing was closely associated with physical devices that could store information, not single apps that allowed you to type. The term was affiliated with a business approach before it was ever tied to a computer. “Word processing was already the center of a thriving industry well before the personal computer gained general acceptance in business,” Haigh added.
“Machines should work. People should think.“
One look at the logo that Paul Rand created for IBM could tell you that the company, despite its straight-laced business industry chops and industrial prowess, was not afraid of doing something bold or experimental to stand out.
And when the company needed to promote the first typewriter that relied on reusable storage, the MT/ST (Magnetic Tape/Selectric Typewriter), it worked with a guy who at the time was best known for coffee commercials, and teamed him with another guy who was known for soundtracking Looney Tunes.
That meant Jim Henson was in charge of the vision of selling this paperwork-saving product to the masses—and he was teamed up with Raymond Scott, who was by this time already a living legend.
Together, they came up with something that could have only come out of 1967. Scott stepped up with a minimal, blip-heavy electronic soundtrack, and Henson followed suit with the visuals for “Paperwork Explosion,” a five minute clip that combines apparent stock footage of paper, clocks, space shuttles; Mad Menera office drones, staring directly in the camera and repeating robotic lines; and soundtrack-emphasized quick cuts.
Three minutes in, in the most banal, droning voice possible, a man in glasses shows up on the screen, and says, verbatim: “IBM can help you with the time it takes to do the paperwork.” It is not cheerful. It is unsettling.
The video was with some precedent—Henson was known during this time for working with corporate giants and creating experimental art that spoke to a brand’s importance. But in a lot of ways, “Paperwork Explosion” was more impactful because it had needled on such a major pain point for office workers in 1967.
One fascinating footnote here: In some ways, the approach is very similar in tone to Apple’s famous 1984 commercial, but also its even darker Lemmings commercial, both of which were interpreted as rips on IBM.
That latter ad introduced the Mac’s office project, an early attempt at introducing local-area networking that played a key role in the beginning of the desktop publishing revolution—a place where modern word processors have been stuck ever since.
Sounds like we’re in need of another paper explosion.
— Author and journalist Joan Didion, explaining to Salon in 1996 how the word processor changed her writing style. The addition of being able to easily edit and remove information? That was a significant improvement over typewriters or even pen and paper, and it changed the way people wrote. The literary world had concerns, however, notes Matthew Kirschenbaum, a University of Maryland professor who wrote a book titled Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. “The key word here is perfection,” Kirschenbaum told The Boston Globe. “Word processing created a very effective illusion of the perfect page. But that meant all material traces of the author’s labor were absent.”