CPT Corporation was founded in 1971 by Dean Scheff in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with co-founders James Wienhold and Richard Eichhorn.

[2] The CPT logo—originally three letters chosen to sound well together—began to be taken as an acronym for "cassette powered typewriting," and subsequently for "computer processed text," and numerous other variants.

[3] CPT Corporation was fifth in size among Minnesota-based top high-tech companies, after 3M, Honeywell, Control Data, and Medtronic.

[4] Corporate revenues grew to approximately a quarter-billion dollars per year in the mid-1980s, then declined with the proliferation of personal computers.

The CPT 4200 was a dual-cassette-tape unit with a small built-in keyboard that controlled a modified IBM Selectric typewriter.

Keystrokes entered on the typewriter appeared on the paper as they were recorded on the output cassette, which formed a magnetic replica of the characters printed on the page.

Line boundaries (aka printer margins) recorded on the input tape were ignored or retained depending on whether or not the "adjust" key had been selected.

A keyboard with a large set of extra keys made operating the 8000 quite easy even for people without any computer skills or background.

The text page could both smooth pan and scroll by the hardware in the display board and nothing quite like it existed for a very long time.

It combined a ZIP drive for backup and hard disk(s) that would be shared simultaneously by up to eight CPT machines that had the PC AT bus.

CPT PT was a reduced a version of the software that ran under MS-DOS as an application on IBM PC compatible computers.

The Genius display was a stand-alone, vertically-oriented (portrait) configuration monochrome grey-scale CRT monitor unit and an IBM PC form factor display card to allow high-resolution, full-page text & graphics on IBM PC compatible computers.

A special MS-DOS driver was required, but allowed a text screen to be 80 characters wide and 66 lines tall (a normal printed page parameters).

Windows 3.0 drivers were also developed for this product that allowed for full-page screen presentations, just like their dedicated word processors, but with the addition of monochrome graphics.

Price: $1500[8] Daisy wheel printers from Qume Corporation and Diablo Systems could be connected to the 8000 and 8500 series word processors.