Screen‐based word processors have been available all through the 1970s, although widespread interest and use dates from about 1975. Conventional offices, generating and manipulating many thousands of words, started to take advantage of the features word processors offer on a much wider scale than they had ever done with their forerunners, the automatic typewriters. Libraries and information departments who were concerned primarily with the already printed and published word were rather slower to realise that they too generated a relatively large number of words in their own right and that these words, in the form of, for example, catalogue cards, accessions lists, abstracts, bibliographies, reports and so on, could perhaps be handled more beneficially by word processors. However, once it began, interest grew rapidly, although actual installation of equipment has been considerably slower—probably a reflection of the limited budgets frequently allocated to such services for the purchase of technological aids.
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