Desktop Word Processors

With the personal computer revolution of the late 1970s, people found new ways to use computers for writing. If your immediate reaction to that sentence is to ask about the “personal computer” term, it’s important to remember personal computer was used long before the modern “PC.” That name even dates back further than the IBM PC in 1981; the Commodore PET (January 1977), Apple II (June 1977), and TRS-80 (August 1977) were all “personal computers.” Looking further back, the Altair 8800 and IMSAI 8080 microcomputers might also be called personal computers, but I don’t want to get too distracted by semantics of the terminology.