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Stephen Piner Writes "Expensive Typewriter," the First Word Processing Program

1961 to 1962
Title page of Pine's Report on "Expensive Typewriter"
This report on "Expensive Typewriter" appears to have been typed on a conventional typewriter, perhaps a manual typewriter, rather than an IBM Selectric or a computer printer.

Expensive Typewriter, a text editing program written in 1961-62 for the DEC PDP-1 at MIT by Stephen D. Piner, has been called the first word processing program. It could drive an IBM Selectric typewriter, and was called "expensive" because the DEC PDP-1, the first minicomputer, then cost $100,000.  The name was also taken in the spirit of a 1960 computer text editor called Colossal Typewriter.

♦ In December 2013 a report on the program written by Stephen Piner and dated August 1, 1972 was available the Computer History Museum at this link.

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