There are no secretaries at this Canadian National Railway office. No typewriters, either. Management has replaced the old-fashioned machines with time-saving "word processors." These green-screened machines, operated by specially-trained staff, resemble small television sets with keyboards. Operators perform twice the work of one secretary using a standard typewriter. With the new invention, entire paragraphs can now be moved around within one document and mistakes erased by backspacing and retyping.

• Word processors, computer systems for electronically editing, displaying and storing text using a keyboard, were first used in Canadian offices in the late 1970s. Magazines advertised assembly-required personal computers for the home in the early 1970s.
• The PC's first word processing program, written by programmer Michael Shrayer in 1976, was called the Electric Pencil.

• In 1642, France’s Blaise Pascal created an outline for an early computer called a "digital calculating machine."
• Computers were used in the Second World War by the German, British and American armies to crack secret codes.
• In 1965, an American computer system called the National Data Center created anxiety about privacy loss and civil liberties infringement. People worried it would create a dystopian state abusing personal information.

• Computers accelerated the sharing of information, especially by way of the Internet, which in some cases has contributed to stock market uncertainty, such as the 1998 Asian Crisis.
• Scelbi (SCientific, ELectronic and BIological), the first advertised personal computer, was created in Milford, Connecticut in 1974 and contained one kilobyte of memory.
• In 2002, a powerful home PC had one gigabyte (1 million kilobytes) of RAM (random access memory.)

Medium: Television
Program: The National
Broadcast Date: Aug. 26, 1978
Reporter: Robert Fisher
Guest(s): Caroline Lai, Stan Lewis, Bill Mackenzie
Duration: 2:44