Here’s an interesting piece in of literary trivia that was in the Authors Guild Bulletin (Spring 2012). Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, an English professor at the University of Maryland, gave a lecture recently at the New York Public entitled, “Stephen King’s Wang.” King’s first computer was a Wang.
Kirschendaum collects old computers and hopes to discover “Who was the first novelist to use a word processor?”
Mark Twain was the first to use a typewriter, for Life on the Mississippi, and The New York Times quotes Nietzsche, who typed, “Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts.”
One of the earliest bestsellers written on a computer was Tom Clancy’s 1984 The Hunt for Red October. Frank Herbert’s Dune may have been submitted to his publisher in the late 1970s on 8-inch floppy disks, according to Kirschendaum.
Kirschenbaum’s Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing is due for publication in 2013 or, according to the Times, “as soon as he can finish tapping it out on his iBuyPower 64-bit laptop.”