Expensive Typewriter was a text editing program that ran on the DEC PDP-1 computer that had been recently delivered at MIT. Since it could drive an IBM Selectric typewriter (a letter-quality printer), it may be considered the first word processing program, although it was not WYSIWYG, having no CRT display. It was written and improved between 1961 and 1962 by Steve Piner and L. Peter Deutsch.
In the spirit of an earlier editor, named "Colossal Typewriter", it was called "Expensive Typewriter" because at the time the PDP-1 cost a lot of money (approximately 100,000 USD).
Famous quotes containing the words expensive and/or typewriter:
“To regard one’s immortality as an exchange of matter is as strange as predicting the future of a violin case once the expensive violin it held has broken and lost its worth.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed
but this is the typewriter that sits before me
and love is where yesterday is at.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)