Matthew Kirschenbaum, the English professor at work on a literary history of word processing, may only be in the beginning stages of his research, but already some early adopters of the technology are chiding him for not doing his homework.  In a recent blog post the science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle criticized Mr. Kirschenbaum for failing to award him bragging rights as the first to complete a science fiction novel — and perhaps any kind of novel — on a computer. Not only did he begin writing fiction on a souped-up Z-80 PC named Zeke in the late 1970s, Mr. Pournelle noted, but his old computer is also currently in the collection of the Smithsonian, albeit in storage.  Mr. Pournelle was much friendlier in a phone conversation, Mr. Kirschenbaum said, as were the dozen or so other name-brand novelists who have been in touch since the article appeared to share reminiscences of computers past, like the best-selling crime writer Stuart Woods, who jokingly told Mr. Kirschenbaum that he had “invented” word processing in his head in the mid-1970s but had to wait until 1979 to find a system he could actually afford. (His first novel, “Chiefs,” he said, was written on a PC.)  “Everyone has their own personal origin story,” Mr. Kirschenbaum said in an interview following up on the initial New York Times report. “There’s something about this subject that strikes a chord with people.” He declined to name the other well-known novelists he said had reached out to him, either directly or through an assistant.  Could Mr. Pournelle — who also wrote an enthusiastic introduction to Newt Gingrich’s 1984 pro-computer futurist manifesto “Window of Opportunity” — really be the first to compose a novel on a PC?  “Quite possibly,” Mr. Kirschenbaum said. “He certainly has a strong claim.”  But that doesn’t mean Mr. Pournelle was the first to commit acts of literature on any kind of computer. Mr. Kirschenbaum has collected anecdotes about people writing poetry on mainframes, using the line-editing tools programmers normally used to debug code, before the invention of PCs in the 1970s. And he has heard from a former student of John Hersey, the author of “Hiroshima,” citing a Paris Review interview in which Hersey described retyping a novel he had written longhand into a mainframe computer at Yale in 1972, and revising it using an experimental interface created by a young engineer.  “I think there’s a great deal of nonsense about computers and writers,” Hersey, who died in 1993, told The Paris Review. “The machine corrupts the writer, unless you write with a pencil you haven’t chosen the words, and so on. But it has made revision much more inviting to me.”  Mr. Kirschenbaum also heard from one of the authors of an early IBM report on word processing, “Study of the Use of Man-Machine Consoles for Text Processing” (completed in 1963, only two years after the introduction of the groundbreaking Selectric typewriter). And a former president of Wang Laboratories also got in touch to reminisce about the day in 1982 when Stephen King showed up at the factory in Lowell, Mass., to pick up the System 5 he used to write “Talisman.” (Mr. King’s collaborator on that book, Peter Straub, used an IBM, hooked up to the Wang with a modem.)  But the most moving testimonial, Mr. Kirschenbaum said, came from the poet and essayist Judy Grahn, who told him that her Exxon PC (produced by a now-defunct branch of the oil company) saved her a full year on “Another Mother Tongue” (1984), a cultural history of gay life published in the early years of the AIDS epidemic.  “That’s a year she considers really important to her,” Mr. Kirschenbaum said. “It’s another unexpected way in which the technology turns out to have played a really important role for a particular author.”
Writers are approaching Matthew Kirschenbaum, a professor who is working on a history of word processing, to claim that they were the first to create novels using computers.