Colossal Typewriter by
John McCarthy and Roland Silver was one of the earliest computer
text editor
A text editor is a type of computer program that edits plain text. Such programs are sometimes known as "notepad" software (e.g. Windows Notepad). Text editors are provided with operating systems and software development packages, and can be u ...
s. The program ran on the
PDP-1
The PDP-1 (''Programmed Data Processor-1'') is the first computer in Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP series and was first produced in 1959. It is famous for being the computer most important in the creation of hacker culture at Massachusett ...
at
Bolt, Beranek and Newman
Raytheon BBN (originally Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc.) is an American research and development company, based next to Fresh Pond in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States.
In 1966, the Franklin Institute awarded the firm the Frank P. Brown ...
(BBN) by December 1960.
[Eric Fischer (17 May 1999)]
CYHIST Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace
Fischer quotes a 1964 citation by William R. Nugent[Computer History Museum]
Colossal Typewriter Program (CT), 1960archived
. Retrieved 02 May 2022.
About this time, both authors were associated with the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern t ...
, but it is unclear whether the editor ran on the
TX-0
The TX-0, for ''Transistorized Experimental computer zero'', but affectionately referred to as tixo (pronounced "tix oh"), was an early fully transistorized computer and contained a then-huge 64 K of 18-bit words of magnetic-core memory. Constr ...
on loan to MIT from
Lincoln Laboratory
The MIT Lincoln Laboratory, located in Lexington, Massachusetts, is a United States Department of Defense federally funded research and development center chartered to apply advanced technology to problems of national security. Research and de ...
or on the PDP-1 donated to MIT in 1961 by
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president unti ...
. A "Colossal Typewriter Program" is in the BBN Program Library,
and, under the same name, in the
DECUS
The Digital Equipment Computer Users' Society (DECUS) was an independent computer user group related to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). The Connect User Group Community, formed from the consolidation in May, 2008 of DECUS, Encompass, HP- ...
Program Library as ''BBN- 6'' (CT).
[DECUS number 71 (June 1968]
DECUS PDP-1 Program Library Catalog
/ref>
See also
* Expensive Typewriter
Expensive Typewriter was a pioneering text editor program that ran on the DEC PDP-1 computer which had been delivered to MIT in the early 1960s.
Description
Since the program could drive an IBM Selectric typewriter (a letter-quality printer), ...
* TECO
* RUNOFF
Runoff, run-off or RUNOFF may refer to:
* RUNOFF, the first computer text-formatting program
* Runoff or run-off, another name for bleed, printing that lies beyond the edges to which a printed sheet is trimmed
* Runoff or run-off, a stock market ...
* TJ-2
TJ-2 (Type Justifying Program) was published by Peter Samson in May 1963 and is thought to be the first page layout program. Although it lacks page numbering, page headers and footers, TJ-2 is the first word processor to provide a number of es ...
Notes
1960 software
Text editors
History of software
{{text-editor-stub