I’m currently reading “Track Changes – A Literary History of Word Processing” by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) which is about an interesting period of time in which computers weren’t powerful enough to allow for the mess we’re in today and therefore were limited to basic text manipulation only. For my research in hypertext system architecture and implementation, I usually don’t look too much at retro computing because in practice I can’t get such machines and their software in order to do my own reading, writing, publishing and curation with them. It gets relevant again where these earlier artifacts provided certain mechanisms, functions and approaches, which got lost/abandoned and are generally not available anymore. My particular question towards the book has to do with the change tracking text editor I was programming, and the title of the book referring to the “track changes” feature of Microsoft Word left me wondering if there is or was a writing environment that implemented change tracking, the “right” way. I’m not aware of a single one, but there must be one out there I guess, it’s too trivial for not having come into existence yet.

After completing the read, the hypertext-relevant findings are: over time, the term “word processor” referred to a dedicated hardware device for writing (not necessarily a general-purpose Turing-complete computer), to a person in an office who would perform writing tasks, then “word processing” as an organizational methodology for the office (probably the “office automation” Douglas Engelbart was not in favor of), later as a set of capabilities to “process text-oriented data” analogous to data processing and finally, as we know it today, almost exclusively as a category of software applications geared towards the production of short letters using the DTP paradigm of direct + manual layout formatting. The latter resulted in a huge loss of the earlier text-oriented capabilities, which are pretty rare in modern word processor applications as these remain primarily concerned with the separate activity of typesetting for print (in the WYSIWYG way). The earlier word processors were limited to just characters on the screen because the graphical user interface hadn’t arrived yet, so instead, interesting schemes for text manipulation were offered. The book doesn’t discuss those in great detail, but at least indicates their past existence, so further exploration can be conducted.

Kirschenbaum once again confirms the outrageously bad practices/habits regarding the way “publishers” deal with “their” texts and how authors and editors “collaborate” together. The book is more of a report on the historical development, so don’t expect suggestions for improvement or a grand vision about how we might make text work better in the future.