A defining moment in the Keynote that launched the original iPhone was when Steve Jobs revealed that it would combine an iPod, a phone and an ‘internet communications device’. I don’t think even Steve Jobs, though, envisaged the range of tasks (and devices) that the iPhone would absorb. Our ‘pocket supercomputers’ have taken on roles big and small; email machines, movie players, instant messengers, games consoles, GPS devices, step counters and so on and so on. By now we are all thoroughly used to the idea of computing being a general purpose technology and that we should expect the range of tasks that we can use computers for to expand all the time; most recently we are finding more and more uses for Large Language Models, with the computer taking on roles that would have seemed like science fiction only a handful of years ago. It didn’t start out that way though. If we go back far enough individual computers were often designed and then for one role only. There were dedicated word-processors like the IBM 6580 Displaywriter System, an Intel 8086 based computer bundled with IBM’s own word processing software. Even when, like the original IBM PC, the machine was a general purpose computer, many machines were destined to only ever run Wordstar, Wordperfect or (later on) Word loaded from a floppy or a 5MB Hard Disk. As computers have become more capable though, they have also become more complex. The operation of, what were previously simple single-function devices, has become obscured beneath decades of cutting edge hardware and software engineering. Which brings us to the TV programme “The Secret Life of the Word Processor”. The programme was first broadcast in 1993 as an episode in the final season of the series ‘The Secret Life of Machines’ and was shown on Channel 4 in the UK and PBS in the US. In each episode in the series presenter and creator Tim Hunkin takes the viewer though a highly engaging and educational tour of the history and inner workings of the...