In the early 1980s, most authors still preferred the old good mechanical (sometimes electric) typewriters. But Stephen Edwin King, a master of the horror genre, was one of the innovators. He bought a Wang 2200/WP word processor, and was pleasantly impressed with the Delete and Insert key functions.
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Unfortunately, on the same day the writer was severely poisoned, and his ill health prevented him from falling asleep. It was then that the plot of his story "Word Processor of the Gods" was born, where the writer Richard Hagstrom after the death of his nephew in a car accident gets a homemade word processor that can change the world. Sentences typed on it become reality, and deleted ones disappear from life. Thus, the hero of the story gets rid of his hated son and wife, and resurrects his dead nephew and his mother (with whom he was in love in his youth) - as his new family. The story was first published in the January 1983 issue of Playboy.
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Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States, went through several unpleasant hours in 1981 when he accidentally pressed the wrong keys on his word processor. The last pages of his memoirs, written over several days, have disappeared. The special piquancy of the situation is that the $12,000 Lanier word processor model was called "No Problem". Fortunately, experts were able to recover lost information - the device saved a backup on a floppy disk.
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Although Carter was fascinated by the possibilities of computer editing of texts, from that moment on he printed the results of his work every day - out of harm's way.
Note: The Lanier Model 103 "No Problem" word processor, released in 1978, used an 8-bit Intel 8080 microprocessor, had 32 KB of RAM, and weighed 40 kg. The information was stored on one-sided floppy disks with 77 tracks and 32 "hard" sectors (i.e., each sector corresponded to the index hole on the disk). Data was encoded by MMFM modulation, not standard MFM, and bytes were written in reverse order. Proprietary software was used.
