“As if being 1984 weren’t enough.” Thomas Pynchon, writing in The New York Times Book Review, marked the unnerving year with an honest question about seemingly dystopian technology: “Is It OK to Be a Luddite?” The Association of American Publishers records that by 1984, between 40 and 50 percent of American authors were using word processors. It had been a quarter-century since novelist C.P. Snow gave a lecture in which he saw intellectual life split into “literary” and “scientific” halves. Pynchon posited that the division no longer held true; it obscured the reality about the way things were going. “Writers of all descriptions are stampeding to buy word processors,” he wrote. “Machines have already become so user-friendly that even the most unreconstructed of Luddites can be charmed into laying down the old sledgehammer and stroking a few keys instead.”

TRACK CHANGES: A LITERARY HISTORY OF WORD PROCESSING by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum Harvard University Press, 368 pp., $29.95

The literary history of the early years of word processing—the late 1960s through the mid-’80s—forms the subject of Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s new book, Track Changes. The year 1984 was a key moment for writers deciding whether to upgrade their writing tools. That year, the novelist Amy Tan founded a support group for Kaypro users called Bad Sector, named after her first computer—itself named for the error message it spat up so often; and Gore Vidal grumped that word processing was “erasing” literature. He grumped in vain. By 1984, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michael Chabon, Ralph Ellison, Arthur C. Clarke, and Anne Rice all used WordStar, a first-generation commercial piece of software that ran on a pre-DOS operating system called CP/M. (One notable author still using WordStar is George R.R. Martin.)

In the late 1970s and ’80s, brands of home computers proliferated: TRS-80 Model I, Commodore PET, Philips/Magnavox VideoWriter 250. All of these were stand-alone machines with price tags over $500. In 1984, Apple released the Macintosh personal computer, which included MacWrite, a word processor that couldn’t deal with documents over eight pages. Very few writers liked it—with the notable exceptions of Douglas Adams, creator of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Mona Simpson, who used MacWrite to compose Anywhere but Here while interning at The Paris Review. Simpson had an excellent reason for enjoying the new Mac: Her biological brother, Steve Jobs, had invented it.

Genre writers were among the earliest adopters of new word processing technologies—experimenting with them as early as the 1970s—since they were often more adventurous and less precious than their hyper-literary colleagues. Many of the highest-browed in the literary world resisted word processing for decades. Indeed, some writers would conceal the fact that they used a word processor for fear of being tarnished by an association with automation or inauthenticity. In a 2011 New York Times article, Gish Jen recalled colleagues at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1980s doctoring their printouts, adding unnecessary pencil annotations in order to make their manuscripts seem more “real,” less perfect. Perfect copy, after all, was for the typist, not the genius.

The first book to be word-processed, according to Kirschenbaum, was Len Deighton’s Bomber in 1970, a World War II thriller written on an IBM MT/ST, a machine that married the Selectric typewriter with new magnetic tape technology. The typewriter part was built into a desk and the tape remembered what you’d typed so you could go back and make edits, but only with some difficulty. Arthur C. Clarke’s 1982 sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey was written on an Archives III microcomputer running WordStar, the manuscript having been “conveyed from Colombo, Sri Lanka (where Clarke had lived since the 1950s), to New York on a five-and-a-quarter-inch disk.” The book’s final words, Kirschenbaum points out with delight, are these: “Last-minute corrections were transmitted through the Padukka Earth Station and the Indian Ocean Intelsat V.” Isaac Asimov changed his writing practice radically when he began to word process in 1981 at the ripe age of 61. A producer of notoriously dirty copy, Asimov found word processing cleaned up his act: “I end up with letter-perfect copy and no one can tell it wasn’t letter-perfect all the time. … Then I have it printed—br-r-rp, br-r-p, br-r-p—and as each perfect page is formed, my heart swells with pride. … I hope the copy editors appreciate the new me.”