The technology of writing ...

Where's the USB port?

Technology has been something that's featured in many books written by Len Deighton, not least of course the computer 'brain' that was at the heart of General Widwinter's grand scheme to invade the USSR in Billion Dollar Brain.

While that book was written on a contemporary type-writer, Deighton's 1970 novel Bomber was the first novel fully written on the, then, new-fangled word-processor. This fact is confirmed in a new book by Matthew Kirschenbaum, Track Change: A Literary History of Word Processing. This book has just been released and a nice review can be found here on the New Republic website.

The author confirms that Bomber claims the title of first word-processed book, written by Deighton on an IBM MT/ST machine so large that he had to have the windows taken out of his south London home to get the machine into his office - compare that now of course with the size of the average tablet computer! The picture to the right shows said machine!