1970-1980 Personal computers are introduced as a replacement for the old model of a mainframe with remote terminals. Computing power now available for your desktop. Still pretty expensive, not commonplace. Working with machine-readable texts still the dominant activity. Competing standards for operating systems and machine-readable texts make open exhange of materials difficult.
Computers begin to be used for scholarly editing activity.
Record the variants and output the results. But there was no agreed-upon standard for doing this. In the early years, texts were typed into the computer, the computer processed them out of sight, and the results were viewed on a printout. As far as the scholar was concerned the text only briefly left the safety of the printed page. Bender predicted that the most accurate edition would be a computer-readable copy of all the relevant editions stored one behind the other as layers of machine memory.