Although it lacks page numbering, page headers and footers, TJ-2 is the first word processor to provide a number of essential typographic alignment and automatic typesetting features: Developed from two earlier Samson programs, Justify[1] and TJ-1,[2] TJ-2 was written for the PDP-1 that was donated to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961 by Digital Equipment Corporation.

Taking English text as input, TJ-2 aligns left and right margins, justifying the output using white space and word hyphenation.

The computer's six toggle switches control the input and output devices, enable and disable hyphenation and stop the session.

Words can be hyphenated with a light pen on the computer's CRT display and from the session's dictionary in memory.

"[4] TJ-2 was succeeded by TYPSET and RUNOFF, a pair of complementary programs written in 1964 for the CTSS operating system.