Expensive Typewriter
Computer program
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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.
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]
