Memory and money

Idle curiosity moved me to revisit William Zinsser’s Writing with a Word Processor (1983) and relive my days typing a dissertation into an IBM Displaywriter. Speak, memory:

Memory, in the world of word processors, is temporary. The word applies to what you have been typing until you transfer it to a diskette for storage. The machine holds your words in its “memory” while you are working on them so that you can keep looking at them and changing them. You’ll grasp this fact more easily if you visualize where the memory is. The memory is inside the electronic module that the screen sits on top of. It’s part of the equipment that is actually enabling you to write; it’s not off to one side, like the diskette unit, which is for storing what you have written, or like the printer, which is for printing what you have stored.

Another helpful fact to keep in mind is that the memory has a limit to what it will hold: approximately 1,000 words. After that it will automatically start moving words over to the work diskette to be stored. This means that you can lose up to 1,000 words while typing if anything goes wrong with the equipment or the power.

Not for the fainthearted. And not for those without means. Wikipedia says that the introductory (June 1980) price of a Displaywriter system was $7,895 (equivalent to $32,220.67 in October 2026). The monthly rental was $275 ($1,122.32 these days). As I recall, there were two university Displaywriters available to me. One required a letter of permission; one required a key to get into an office after hours.

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Pagination : Utnapishtim’s word-processor (With a photograph of an enormous Displaywriter disk)