Re: Friden
Hi all,just found this forum and read on the great lady’s death. I was involved in the technical side of the introduction of the Redactron in Australian 1974. I had previously worked for Singers Business Machine so I knew all about the Flexowriter and the Redactron was definitely a more refined machine for the office environment, the legal fraternity loved it for the quality type from the golf ball and the cassettes were a vast improvement over the paper tape. The lady really hit the mark with this product,all power to her.
As far as the first word processors, I worked for a small Australian company Datatronics in the early 70s that developed a screen based word processor from scratch based on the PDP8 or the Nova1210 and a modified Phillips TV. This was sold all around Asis to go with the SINGER phottypesetter and it had many of the features of a modern W/P. The guy who designed the software and hardware was a genius. The interface board was 15” square full of 7400 series chips and fully wire wrapped. Oh for the good old days.
Then it was on to DATAPOINT..
Cheers, David