“What would you rather do, edit text or process words?”, I once quipped. Funny, if unfair (since the aptness of a system’s nomenclature need not be a reflection of its quality). What I did not realize at the time was that there was a social reality manifest in the term “word processing”, that indeed it was an instance of Conway’s Law—that any system reflects the organizational structure that produced it.
Thomas Haigh, in “Remembering the Office of the Future: The Origins of Word Processing and Office Automation” explains how word processing was originally an idea about reorganizing typists (on the model of data processing, conceived as an organziational principle):
Today, when someone talks about using a word processor,we think of a software package, such as Microsoft Word. However, in the early 1970s, when the idea of word processing first gained prominence, it referred to a new way of organizing work: an ideal of centralizing typing and transcription in the hands of specialists equipped with technologies such as automatic typewriters. The word processing concept was promoted by IBM to present its typewriter and dictating machine division as a complement to its “data processing” business. Within the word processing center, automatic typewriters and dictating machines were rechristened word processing machines, to be operated by word processing operators rather than secretaries or stenographers. Quickly, however, the term acquired a more specialized meaning to refer almost exclusively to computerized text editing systems aimed at office applications. Computerized word processing does not fit the conventional concept of a distinct invention, attributable to a particular time, place, and brilliant mind. The creation of a distinct market for computerized word processing systems during the early 1970s was more a matter of repackaging, integrating, and marketing technologies already devised for different purposes. Word processing software’s core technical capabilities were taken from text editors, used to manipulate program code on time-sharing computer systems since the 1960s. Word processing systems also drew on techniques in a number of broader, longer established fields in which computers were used to store, retrieve, index, and format textual information.
Ulrich Steinhilper, a German IBM sales execcutive is usually credited with coining the term word processing. Below is a reconstruction of Steinhilper’s diagram of his original concept reproduced by Haigh:
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