The Processing Demands of Writing

To facilitate the production of the text that you are now reading I (MT) am using a common word processing application running on a personal computer. As I write, the word processor is monitoring what I type for spelling errors. If I asked it to, it would also check to see if the text I produce is grammatical (according to its own, somewhat arcane criteria). Elsewhere on the computer I have an email application running, which is monitoring for incoming mail, and bibliographic software that communicates with the word processor when I require it to do so. These are just the things I know about. In the background there appear to be a further twenty-eight processes running, at least some of which are, I assume, essential to the effective working of my computer. Each of these is constantly either manipulating information or standing in preparedness to do so. To accomplish all of this, each process draws, to varying degrees, on both the computer’s random-access memory and its central processor. My current computer has plenty of RAM and a fast processor, and will multi-task quite happily across all of these processes. This would very definitely not have been true of the computer that I used ten years ago. On that machine running just two applications at once resulted in a radical reduction in performance and any further demands would make it grind to a halt.