One of my favorite articles from last year.
via The New York Times:
The Muses of Insert, Delete and Execute
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLERPublished: December 25, 2011
The literary history of the typewriter has its well-established milestones, from Mark Twain producing the first typewritten manuscript with “Life on the Mississippi” to Truman Capote famously dismissing Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” pounded out on a 120-foot scroll, with the quip “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”
Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, a professor of English, asks, “Who was the first novelist to use a word processor?”
The literary history of word processing is far murkier, but that isn’t stopping Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, an associate professor of English at the University of Maryland, from trying to recover it, one casual deletion and trashed document at a time.
Akopos 