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This one may well take you by surprise. The first word processor was the Wang 1200 launched in 1971 by An Wang's company, Wang Laboratories.Designed by Harold Koplow, the Wang 1200 had only four operational modes: record, play, transfer and edit. It was not very powerful and had some persistent issues but it did provide IBM with some much needed competition and made typing documents a thousand times easier than it was before.
The word processor emerged as a stand-alone office machine in the 1970s and 1980s, combining the keyboard text-entry and printing functions of an electric typewriter with a dedicated computer processor for the editing of text. Although features and designs varied among manufacturers and models, and new features were added as technology advanced, word processors typically featured a monochrome display and the ability to save documents on memory cards or diskettes. Later models introduced innovations such as spell checking programs, improved formatting options, and dot-matrix printing.As the more versatile combination of personal computers and printers became commonplace, and computer software applications for word processing became popular, most business machine companies stopped manufacturing word processor machines. As of 2009 there were only two U.S. companies, Classic and Alpha Smart, which still made them. Many older machines, however, remain in use. Since 2009, Sentinel has offered a machine described as a "word processor", but it is more accurately a highly specialized microcomputer used for accounting and publishing.