> The Lanier machine, which sells for about $12,000, takes up about the same amount of desk space as an electric typewriter but is taller by a foot or more because of the cathode-ray display screen.
It is amazing how much the price of word processors has declined over the years. It has dropped from $12,000 to free, provided you have a PC on which to run it:
https://www.openoffice.org/product/writer.html
I wonder if President Carter had to pay for his or if it was free for him given that having him use it was likely was a great advertising opportunity at the time.
There's this 1979 model: https://toweringskills.com/writing/ascendency-of-word-proces...
And this model 103: https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/lanier-model-103-n...
“The operator works at an electronic keyboard that returns the carriage automatically…”
Interesting how the mechanical concept of a carriage carried on.
I've recently read on Bluesky that someone's mother used to use No Problem on a Lanier and loved it more than WordStar. I think that's quite a praise.
EDIT: Found it: https://bsky.app/profile/audiooblivion.bsky.social/post/3leg...
I guess he’s doing all his writing in the cloud now.
I think everyone who spent time computing in the 80s & 90s has at least one tale of woe relating to forgetting to save or crashing before a save or tripping over a power plug, etc.
In retrospect it seems pretty wild that users were expected to actuate an explicit “save” command and that word processors didn’t just handle this automatically.
I’m sure there were real reasons - I was never involved in DOS or Windows programming but I presume it had to do with the slowness of saving to disk (and that a background auto-save wasn’t technically possible?). Or did we just not yet collectively have enough experience to know that auto saving was something critical to writers…?