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Game of Thrones Author George R R Martin Writes with WordStar on DOS
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: "Ryan Reed reports that when most Game of Thrones fans imagine George R.R. Martin writing his epic fantasy novels, they probably picture the author working on a futuristic desktop (or possibly carving his words onto massive stones like the Ten Commandments). But the truth is that Martin works on an outdated DOS machine using '80s word processor WordStar 4.0, as he revealed during an interview on Conan. 'I actually like it,' says Martin. 'It does everything I want a word processing program to do, and it doesn't do anything else. I don't want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type a lower case letter and it becomes a capital letter. I don't want a capital. If I wanted a capital, I would have typed a capital. I know how to work the shift key.' 'I actually have two computers,' Martin continued. 'I have a computer I browse the Internet with and I get my email on, and I do my taxes on. And then I have my writing computer, which is a DOS machine, not connected to the Internet.'"
'It does everything I want a word processing program to do, and it doesn't do anything else. I don't want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type a lower case letter and it becomes a capital letter. I don't want a capital. If I wanted a capital, I would have typed a capital. I know how to work the shift key.'
Amen, brother, Amen!
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I mean when you're writing in made-up languages, you probably don't want auto-correct hassling you.
This seems like kind of an extreme, though - why not just use notepad, emacs, vim, or another one of the billion text editors out there? Or just disable the features you don't like in Word?
In one of his books, he also gives credit to the guy that keeps that outdated system running.
Why do people still pay money for software performing most basic tasks like Word 365? Nowadays, they have millions of alternatives.
I wonder if he uses KVM? probably not but it's nice to believe.
joe has a wordstar emulation mode.
..it takes him 5 years to write a novel. Now we know why.
You can't fit even the shortest of his books into 640K of RAM. AGoT clocks in at 298k words, which is going to take up considerably more than 640k.
I suspect he's probably got each chapter in a separate file. And if I remember correctly the CP/M version of Wordstar had an overlay feature that was a kind of primitive virtual memory. So yeah, I believe it's possible, and there's a lot to be said for Just A Plain Glorified Typewriter. (I got to review the draft of a book by one of the Mac's original designers; it was done in double-spaced Courier with crude hand-drawn illustrations. The formatting was to be done by those who did formatting.)
I'm increasingly using Google Docs for my work because I like the fact that it doesn't allow, and thus doesn't require, much formatting. Less time fiddling is more time working.
I still remember WordPerfect 5.1 running on DOS, once you had all the shortcut keys memorized, was lightning fast and did just what it was supposed to. I get so pissed off clicking on the little blue lightning bolt every 5 seconds to undo something Microsoft thought it was helping me "fix."
'I have a computer I browse the Internet with and I get my email on, and I do my taxes on. And then I have my writing computer, which is a DOS machine, not connected to the Internet.
And for the ultimate in security, he also uses 8" floppies.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
. . . but curiosity got the better of those eager NSA employee fans, who have bugged the computer to know what will happen before the rest of the world . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Sigh.
For creative writing I use focuswriter, for the simple reason I can focus(!) better on the creative proces. All you see is your text. It's awesome. I can't do without internet, but I'm sure if I had the balls to disconnect my laptop I would become a whole lot more productive.
What does "obsolete" mean? If his writing instrument does what he needs it to do and he's happy using it, then more power to him. Who's to tell him he can't use it, or an IBM Selectric, or even a quill pen and vellum? Nothing is obsolete if it still works for your needs.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
If it's working for him, then this makes sense.
What a non-story!
P.S. I assume that no words or names in his fantasy world have any accents or any characters not in the basic ASCII set. DOS WordStar is notably lacking in support for extended characters of any sort. (In fact DOS WordStar uses the high bits of characters for its own purposes, so it cannot ever work with anything beyond 7-bit ASCII.)
http://justsolve.archiveteam.org/wiki/WordStar
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
for a big delay. Oh... I was Just about to print the book when my ancient computer died. Oh well, talk to me in 5 years.
*giggles on his way to the bank*
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm not smart enough to make it
It will be better to purchase from an owner who is a good farmer and a good builder.
My dad still runs Windows 98SE. It does everything he wants it to do. The only reason he upgraded to Windows 98SE was that he needed a new printer and drivers were not available for Windows 95 at the time. The upgrade path that Microsoft promotes only promotes the coffers of Microsoft.
. . . but curiosity got the better of those eager NSA employee fans, who have bugged the computer to know what will happen before the rest of the world . . .
So that explains the *Beep* *Boop* *Hiss* sound he hears every time he boots up his computer these days....
Software doesn't age. Hence all the angst (my own included) about having to throw away perfectly good Windows XP. I still use lots of old software, including Winamp, Textpad, and DVDShrink, just to name a few. Many people's obsession with the newest *thing* is really fucking stupid, in many cases (word processing being one of them).
I don't respond to AC's.
That's how it's done. A person who doesn't worry about "support ending", or having the latest version, or what other people think about him using old tools. He has a perfectly fine tool in his hands, so he grabs it and starts working.
He (gasp) uses an OLD version of Windows because it (gasp) DOES the JOB? He must be some kind of criminal!
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
"It looks like you're trying to write a newsletter about incestuous elves. Would you like assistance?"
I'd be one to use WordPerfect 5, because of its bare minimum UI in edit mode.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
Or he could just use git.
Every time someone complains about how long he takes to write a book he kills another Stark!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I've been using JOE, a WordStar clone, since about 1995--basically since I got my first computer and, a few months later, discovered Slackware Linux, where joe was the default editor.
First thing I do at any job, or when beginning any significant work on a new server, is to download, compile, and install joe. I'm can get by with vi, but I'm at home with joe.
And of course I still use mutt (after elm stopped being maintained) so I could keep using joe.
For serious documents, however, I write LaTeX, sometimes in joe, sometimes with TeXShop--because it's easier to preview the output.
...that he does his own taxes.
Doesn't this Game of Thrones gig pay enough for him to hire an accountant?
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Ryan Reed reports that when most Game of Thrones fans imagine George R.R. Martin writing his epic fantasy novels, they probably picture the author working on a futuristic desktop
Why would anyone think that?
Now I AM going to buy all the books and read them after the TV thing is over. I hope just about all "modern" word processor writers just felt a slap in the face, although part of it must be the users fault too. :)
-- Waiting semi-patiently for next weeks episode.
When asked for advice on "how to become a writer" - most professional writers will come back with some form of "write something, then write something else, then write some more." A big part of the writing process is figuring out when, where, and how you are able to write. i.e. The tools you use to write shouldn't get in the way of your writing (the second most popular tip is "when you aren't writing - read")
if Mark Zuckerberg were to come out and say that he is using a Commodore 64 or TRS-80 to work on Facebook - that would be unusual...
Mr. Martin's writing process has the benefit of being almost 100% secure (maybe Quentin Tarantino needs a downgrade)
It ain't what they call you. It's what you answer to. http://mylyceum.us/
Although one can turn off Microsoft Word's annoying "auto-guess" and "smart replace" features, I've found you have to do it in two different places, do it to each replacement character or sequence, and finding those two places is not intuitive.
Ideally, Microsoft would make a single button for "turn off ALL auto-guess and auto-replacement features". But that's not the Microsoft way: they want you to become dependent on auto-guess such that you'll miss it on competitor products and come running back to Mother Microsoft.
Their stupid "smart quotes" with the forward and backward lean are probably the biggest pet-peeve auto-shit feature of MS. If you paste such text into different products, it often renders them all wrong. MS's solution: "Only use MS products with MS text and everything will be just fine".
MS's behavior often demonstrates the stupid side of capitalism: naive customer manipulation, standards-rigging, monopolies, long-term dependency, bait-and-switch, FUD PR, etc. (I'm not saying there are no upsides to capitalism, but MS sure does a bang-up job of reminding one about the down-sides; if they bother to look around.)
Table-ized A.I.
. . . to WordPerfect 5.1
I really hope the my prospects of downloading future episodes of game of thrones via bittorrent are not threatened by the reliability of floppy disks.
The best way to write anything is still pencil and paper. It doesn't run out of batteries, crash if you drop them (though the lead might break), and you don't have to put them away during taxi and takeoff.
I am Homer of Borg, resistance is - Ooo Donuts!
I will, from time to time, fire up my Apple //e and write in AppleWorks for a while. It's kind of awesome. There are not many features, and the simple text display keeps me focused.
The other thing I like is how the interface, the clackety feel of the keyboard, etc... all take me back to an earlier time. When I connect in that way, with that time, what I write will be different in subtle ways.
Good for him.
Blogging because I can...
I like old machines. People are so quick to throw away the past. Half the fun of using old machines is keeping them working. For me, it is a hobby.
So if I wanted to emulate Martin without having to dig up an XT machine, I would use DOSBox. But since I don't, has anyone used DOSBox for office-ware? How does the printing function work?
I also did some writing using WP 5.1 on DOS back in the day, but later I've come to realize the problem of word processors. The issue became apparent upon learning LaTeX, and since then I've wondered why people spend so much time on the "ink on paper" look, as opposed to the text itself. If you want to focus on text, you should try a plain text editor rather than a "fancy because it's not fancy" word processor.
Further links: http://iki.fi/teknohog/rants/w...
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
So is it really so surprising he's using DOS?
It's a device that can only do wordprocessing. It's not fast, the dictionary doesn't have all the words I use in it, and I use a serial cable to download my documents over x-modem. But it has decent keyboard and enough RAM to hold a book chapter and a ton of notes.
One day it will break, and I will be sad. Perhaps I will have the skills necessary to construct a suitable replacement.
I think it's just a problem of ignorance. Do you think your mother or grandmother have ever even heard of "OpenOffice", or even know how to get it? Probably not. Most of the non-geek world just goes to Staples, walks down the aisle and grabs whatever program they've heard of, or used in the past. 99% of the time that's "Word"
Ryan Reed reports that when most Game of Thrones fans imagine George R.R. Martin writing [...], they probably picture the author working on a futuristic desktop
Holy statement you pulled out of your ass, Batman! I failed to see even the faintest connection between "being the author of a fantasy novel" and "futuristic desktop"... Can anybody help?
George Martin said it, but I feel like screaming this about a dozen times a day. Don't change my words, my punctuation, or my URL. Don't suggest sites I might want to visit, items I might find interesting, or settings more befitting someone my age. Don't give me the ability to change all things *trivial* (e.g. appearance) but nothing that matters. If you're going to help, help me fix real *problems* and not just appearances. ("Ohhh, Microsoft helped me fix my network problem!" - said No one, ever).
In short, BUZZ OFF (And get off my lawn).
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Several of the Wordstar key bindings are supported in -- of all things -- "edit.exe" under Windows.
That being said, I hope he's using a machine with 3.5" floppies -- gonna start getting hard to pull data off 5.25" floppies in the not-crazy-distant future.
I still use Protext on my Atari!
Just need to write something people would pay money to read...
An iPad with the Wi-Fi off and with a $5 writing app and your favorite Bluetooth keyboard (chosen from about 30,000 options) is a great “digital typewriter.” Many writers have moved their writing to an iPad and their Macs are just for Internet and research and so on. Just having your writing on the iPad screen 24/7, your writing app always frontmost, is a huge benefit. Being able to close the Mac and turn the world off and just write is also a huge benefit.
I like the portability of the iPad, too, but if you always write in the same room at the same desk, it doesn't matter if your digital typewriter is an old DOS machine.
For a long time now, I thought that Linux-on-the-desktop should stop trying to make yet another Mac clone and make novel devices using Linux instead. Like a digital typewrite that George R R Martin would switch to.
I'd imagine that there's also a printer in the mix somewhere. While there are still some parallel port models available, I'd imagine they're hard to come by (and that work with DOS, yet).
I hope the GRRM has a backup strategy, because I'd hate to see what happens when that old system fails!
Compatibility: we want our documents to look same if we hand them to somebody else. It's not easy to match MS-Word's layout engine bug-for-bug in another product.
Table-ized A.I.
Sneak in an ASCII Clippy into his WordStar just to mess with him.
Table-ized A.I.
It could do almost anything I ever needed at the time. It did have some weirdness like but it also seemed pretty bulletproof.
Dear George R R. Martin,
I don't mean to burst your "Grumpy old man" shtick, but you can turn all of those features off in just about every program that has them. If you don't want to be bothered with that, let me introduce you to a little piece of revolutionary software:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
Hookup up an old HP Laserjet III or 4 with a parallel port.
They were built like tanks and should last for another couple of decades.
Keep two around just in case.
You're GRR Martin (or at least his tech guy), so you can pay for keeping spares around if needed.
The system here is a bit idiosyncratic, but it's not crazy. There are zero distractions when you're writing.
Biggest thing I'd worry about is backups.
All you need to do is intercept a shipment of a VGA cable
RAGEMASTER: (see image above, right) A concealed $30 device that taps the video signal from a target's computer's VGA signal output so the NSA can see what is on a targeted desktop monitor. It is powered by a remote radar and responds by modulating the VGA red signal (which is also sent out most DVI ports) into the RF signal it re-radiates; this method of transmission is codenamed VAGRANT. RAGEMASTER is usually installed/concealed in the ferrite choke of the target cable
This is because, as a developer, you're a user who understands and knows what you want. Microsoft is writing software for the kind of people who'd type google into the google search bar to get to google.
You know, typing a domain name into search is not a terrible thing to do. It is a valid strategy to avoid domain name typos that may land you on a malware site.
I've been bathed in the internet just about since it's availability in the early 90's. BBSs and various online services before that. While the virtues of being always connected are clear we tend to gloss over the problems it's caused.
Things crash. A lot.
Everything is insecure. Everything has bugs. Everything needs updates to fix the former 2, and introduce more iterations of the former 2 at the same time.
Everything is a god damn mess.
I think there could be a real market for intentionally non-connected. Intentionally simple. Intentionally solid and proven reliable purpose built appliance devices. And when I mean proven reliable I mean it. Mathematically proofed code.
Development time would be long but production costs would be low. Could also stand some new way of getting data in and out that would be reliable yet future proof. Some sort of NFC maybe. The lack of connectors and moving parts would be great for long term reliablity.
.... Should use Org Mode in Emacs ...
I was just thinking this would be something a Raspberry Pi would be perfect for.
In fact, if Wordperfect was still around in a reasonable condition, they could just sell the complete package in a box (just add keyboard and monitor). Or they could just sell the SD card.
So mainframes are resurrected via the cloud and now dedicated word processors will be resurrected via pis. The 1970s are returning. :-)
Why do people still pay money for software performing most basic tasks like Word 365? Nowadays, they have millions of alternatives.
Well, a free Office suite is only free to your business if your employees are as well trained in that suite as they are in Microsoft Office.
I think a lot of people are switching to OpenOffice and LibreOffice on their home machines, but they don't use their Office apps as intensively in the home as they do at work so they don't learn everything they need to do at work.
I don't think GRRM has paid money for software in a very, very, very long time. ;)
Back then you could crap a pile of text onto a page and not worry too much about formatting. Modern word processors are distracting, annoying and the documents they produce look like shit despite (because of?) all this. If I want a document to look pretty, I use LaTeX. Word processors of the WordStar era aren't much different than using a typewriter. As long as you don't try to use white-out on the screen, it should be fine.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
http://sfwriter.com/2008/12/25...
Goodbye Slashdot. You've changed.
The publishers I've dealt with won't accept a written manuscript. You must submit it electronically.
The rules are different for you and I and GRRM. If he showed up at a publisher with a 1,000 trailer trucks filled with clay tablets for book 6 they would sign a deal and cut him a check.
Why doesn't he just run it in DOSBox?
Um. Lookup TEMPEST. VGA cables are essentially broadcasting the screen they are drawing. It's not exactly hard to do.
I know some (less-well-known) writers who do everything longhand until it's time to send it to the publisher.
CBS news commentator Andy Rooney used a manual typewriter for much of his work until late in his career or maybe even until he died.
I personally know someone who keeps a very large production database using a commercial DOS-based program from the early- or mid-'90s. This isn't some military or other scenario where there is a good reason to use outdated software, it's just the personal preference of the person who is maintaining the database and its contents.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Makes sense right up until you connect it to anything else.
No problem, you can connect old computers quite easily with a serial cable.
We've been developing text editors since we invented computers. I "only" have about 25 professional years of experience with them, but everything since wordperfect 4.2 or so hasn't helped us one bit to be more productive or less error prone in our writing. Sure, having a spell checker is nice, but the red squiggly lines under the text I'm editing there are all under words that *I* know are correct but the program doesn't. Current editors often do things to text I don't want. How I can undo that or turn off is often a mystery. With WP you had the option to look at the raw text with the markup in it so you could at least hack out the offending markup. Try opening a modern editor and finding a way to just hack around in the markup; none of them have it. I hate having to spend over ten minutes just trying to find out how to turn off some feature that some dude put in because he felt it would be helpful to me. *I* am the one typing and it's *my* document. Stop it, it's not helping my productivity, even if it's not guessing wrong any significant way. Did professional text editors get more productive the last 20 years? I don't think so, yet software makers have been adding features and whatnot to editors the last 20 years. Evidently, it's totally useless to do so, except for software companies. Editors haven't gotten any better, text producers haven't gotten more productive so essentially, it's a waste of time and effort for anyone but the persons making and selling the software.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
As a visual minded person I would like to say, thank you. Thank you for that image. I do think you are right though, but I do hope he doesn't slashdot, he would it just for the nerd-points.
Not funny so much as depressingly truthful. What makes you think some NSA employee *won't* pilfer your trade secrets and sell them to the highest bidder for personal profit? The NSA has proven that they're unable to prevent employees from accessing unauthorized information, and the employees have both the means (trivial) and opportunity (it's all sitting right there). All you need is motive, and there's plenty of that to go around.
he would do it* Life is too short for proofreading, I read after and then correct. Much less time consuming. :'(
Is it just me or does anyone else think it's probably pretty unlikely that he's making any kind of backups if he's still using DOS? I can just see the future headline now....Game of Thrones author loses entire body of work due to computer crash. How many data recovery shops do you suppose still support MFM disks?
I remember doing my reports back in high school on WP for DOS, on OS/2, the memories....
Just goes to prove if the tool does the job, why change it? There's also something nostalgic using old tools, a friend of mine still uses typewriters, he has about 15 of them, one can even do cursive, another one does french accents, beautiful craftmanship.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
the Lannisters, the Starks, the Targaryens, the Tyrells, the Greyjoys all plain English names
It is a common fantasy translation convention for the viewpoint character's culture to have plain English names. For example, the other well-known RR fantasy author based halflings' names on English naming patterns: Proudfoot, Baggins, Gamgee (from Gammidge, from earlier Gamwich), Brandybuck, etc. (No, Elijah Wood isn't related to Zak Bagans.)
honestly it's a refreshing break from the high fantasy [Unicode fail]
Tolkien's elves spoke a language analogus to Romance, and Romance languages have diacritics.
attackers will eventually find security holes in that software. You can continue to run Windows XP if you wish, but don't expect that software to get patched or have any other support.
Dogdude's point was that there is no fundamental reason to have moved on from Win XP basic design (at least for desktops and laptops I would add) or, in particular, from the word processors of say 15 years ago. The requirements of what they do have not changed. Of course, security and other bugs would need to be addressed as they emerge.
In the face of that, with the implication that they would not sell much software again after everyone is equipped with what they need, Microsoft and other software houses create artificial reasons for their users to replace it. It is marketing's job to convince the customers, or at least some of them (especially PHBs), usually by means of bling, bells and whistles, that they "need" to change; then others must follow suit for reasons such as their older file formats cannot be read by the PHB. The ultimate goal of MS (for example) is of course software rental because they would never need to worry about needing to persuade people to upgrade again.
Does anyone else wonder about the condition of the hard drive that he is using to type these novels? If it's an old DOS machine, I wonder if that hard drive is running on borrowed time..
http://partnerweb.vmware.com/G...
I wonder what his current backup solution is.....
I was working for a computer mail order place (Logicsoft) when WS 4.0 came out. The salespeople all got promotional lucite paperweights; I might still have one!
I used WS 3 and WS 4 to crank out role playing game manuscripts. For most of this time I only had a floppy-only PC-DOS system. This required juggling floppy disks when running spell check. It was great upgrading to a hard disk drive, but I maintained one-or-two-floppy running copies of WordStar that I could bring with me. Kind of like putting applications on a thumb drive.
I used WordStar X.X on an Osborne PC. The "OzBox," which lived in the campus SF library where I spent a lot of my time, had a program that could copy files to single-sided DOS floppies.
I was what you might call a Journeyman user of WS. I used "dot commands" and spell check and maybe even Mail Merge. There was still a lot more I didn't need and didn't bother learning.
I remember buying WordStar 5.0, but regretted it. It couldn't be whittled down to a few floppies.
I still had copies of WordStar (and various versions of DOS) until, um, late last decade, when I got rid of all my floppy disks. If Memory Serves, a fairly complete WordStar 4.0 install took up two 720K floppies. As part of the great reduction I converted all of my old RPG manuscripts to ASCII, so I didn't need a working WS copy.
I sometimes regret the loss of the "keyboard diamond" method of navigation. I could probably set up Word to use it, but it isn't worth the trouble.
Because 90% of all of the other users use office still too, and it gets the job done and they know how to use it. That doesn't make it good, but usually it makes it the best tool for the job.
Ironically one thing I like about Open/Libre office is that it behaves *very* similarly to Office of about 6-7 years ago in terms of UI which I think was a pretty damn optimal UI.
Well other than the lack of outline mode. Which , annoyingly apple's Pages dropped recently too.
And which I have *no idea* how to find on the new fangled ribbon interface thing in modern Office either :(
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
> It's not easy to match MS-Word's layout engine bug-for-bug in another product.
I saw proof of that a few weeks ago. My mother's new computer, with a.new version of Word, couldn't open her existing Word files. I had to open them in LibreOffice and save them using the newest version of the newest Word format using LibreOffice. Then Word could open them.
So yes, in my experience LibreOffice is more compatible with Word than Word is.
I mean when you're writing in made-up languages, you probably don't want auto-correct hassling you.
This seems like kind of an extreme, though - why not just use notepad, emacs, vim, or another one of the billion text editors out there? Or just disable the features you don't like in Word?
Why not just use the one you like and know like the back of your hand? Personally I completely understand because I used to compose music with Octamed on amiga and have never have gotten to the same level of comfortability and flow with music-software since those times.
Actually I think people overestimate how often "Office" is used in office settings. A lot of whats used tends to be specialty and/or niche apps specific to a certain task. We have around 550 computer users in our organization. Maybe 15% of them use Word and/or Excel. The rest have a specific application (or set of apps) that pertains to their job function. Since we've already switched to Gmail for email we're considering just having the majority of the users utilize Google Docs for the occasional time they need to use an office app, and reserving the full copies of Office only for people who heavily use it.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
And discovered some ASCII Art porn. Which thrills the nerdheart, but not in the way that normals expect...
You've got to be kidding me, WordStar. PC Write (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-Write) is MUCH better even if you don't ever want to edit disk sectors directly.
Why do people still pay money for software performing most basic tasks like Word 365? Nowadays, they have millions of alternatives.
I'd be hard put to name ten credible alternatives to the core components of the MS Office suite.
MS Office remains the gold standard for clerical work.
Full time staff. Part-time job. Office temp. Senior Volunteer. It doesn't matter. If you have MS Office skills, you are employable anywhere south of the Artic circle.
If your employer supports Microsoft's Home Use Program, Office Professional Plus 2013 is yours to download for $9.95. Take Office home for just $9.95. Software Assurance Home Use Program
The alternative is someone who bought Word for Windows 2.0 back in the day for $495, and doesn't want to use anything else, because A that was a LOT OF FREAKING MONEY back then, and B it does what they need it to do, and they don't see any point in upgrading, because with enough messing around you can keep it going on and on forever. and heck with a dedicated VM, it runs more stable (all alone) than it ever did.
I just hope he is backing up his novel draft now... He got lucky last time.
Why do people still pay money for software performing most basic tasks like Word 365? Nowadays, they have millions of alternatives.
Most people dont. The last time I actually bought Office was when I got offered it for $15 through work.
Businesses buy Office, they pay $50 a year per license and the PHB's have been suckered in by MS marketing.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Microsoft is writing software for the kind of people who'd type google into the google search bar to get to google.
Microsoft Office targets users whose working day is defined by the documents they read and write.
I have yet to be convinced that the geek has any real understanding of the significance and demands of clerical work as performed on the shoproom floor, by the office temp, salesman, middle management or the CEO.
or send files to the publishers, producers? Does he copy them onto a 1.44 MB floppy disk and put the disk into another computer? The he uses the other computer to email and or print the script/novel/text? I guess that is the only way. Just wondering.
My old computer had Windows 3.1 and a dial-up connection, I think. Or was that Windows 95. At least I could email small files to other people with the Pentium 1 computer running at 166 MHz. I also had a 100 MB zip drive connected to the old LPT port too. lol
Well other than the lack of outline mode. Which , annoyingly apple's Pages dropped recently too.
And which I have *no idea* how to find on the new fangled ribbon interface thing in modern Office either :(
You go to the "View" tab (the last one) and it's button number four.
:)
Just FYI
I use outline mode all the time. (And I also like the Ribbon, which makes me a heretic around here.)
No, that link you posted to a web comic we've all seen a hundred times is not "obligatory."
have you taken a look at most modern computers, a serial port is pretty rare in a laptop or a desktop nowadays. I have 3 laptops and 5 desktop machines around me ranging in age from 5 years to 2 months, not a single serial port to be had amongst any of them
OH NOES! the microsquishies cried! A guy who is a celebrated author is blowing up the myth that 'unless its not the very latest bleeeeeeeding version of word 122.36b, then you are clearly falling behind and half a step from oblivion!!! You clearly cannot communicate properly or be able to transition with others using the absolute very latest bleeeeeeeding version of word 122.36b. Your performance will suffer greatly and the Gates from whom all dirty tricks comes forth would loose out on a few cents revenue, all while dozens of MCSE's would have to scamper back under the leaves instead of being able to overcharge. What the hell is that!?!?!
I Envy You George...
I wonder if lotus 1-2-3 for DOS is free... then maybe I can use a VM to go back in time... aaah all those years ago.
I second that Amen but there is another benefit to the way he's doing his thing: the writing computer has no internet or other distractions.
I figured Martin used the flesh of a sacrificed unclean animals as parchment and wrote with the blood of children in order to gain the unholy success that he has had.
It's weird seeing the vi vs emacs argument turned into wordstar/wordperfect vs word. Or do what I type & don't fix it.
To write, you need a tool to put down text and get out of the way. How often does a writer need to do italics and bold face?
Not only what you said, but it is also useful for websites that are constantly being taken down and re-hosted such as The Pirate Bay. It has changed names so many times now I couldn't tell you what the addy is. I just throw it in Google and grab the first link.
If I were doing this type of writing I would want a monitor that doesn't actually exist - I would actually want an e-ink monitor the size of a legal size sheet of paper, possibly an 11x17 "tabloid" size. I know they used to make "Paper White" CRT monitors in the mid to late 90's, but the last thing I would want is a CRT. Failing that I would do green on black monochrome with an LCD, I can't seem to get away from liking that, but I would consider a PixelQi. Lots of light coming out of the monitor draws you into the screen and out of your head, the wrong direction.
Someone should focus on making a monitor specifically for writing. Those "Paper white" CRT's are the last thing I can think of with writining in mind, and that was more for the publishing end of the spectrum.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
He wrote the entire goddamn Baroque Cycle *by hand* with a fountain pen.
I still don't understand why Microsoft never implemented that fully.
5.25" floppies, in my general experience, are an order of magnitude more reliable than 3.5" floppies. It relates more to the media quality than anything innate about the size (although recording density may be an issue too). They just started cheaping out later on, and never got around to cheaping out on the 5.25" stuff.
"I hate some of these modern systems where you type a lower case letter and it becomes a capital letter. I don't want a capital. If I wanted a capital, I would have typed a capital"
The next character to die on Game of Thrones is definitely going to be Clippy!
By the way, he's completely and utterly wrong. You need split screens with a separate notes file kept up in realtime to map logical events and maintain chronology or you'll open up plotholes a dragon could fly through. I always keep lists of what characters did what and any noteworthy "absolutes" that I mentioned about each character so I don't cause logical violations. He must be keeping them on paper or something as side notes because you simply cannot write a book without doing that.
Great, so use a RS232 terminal with a paper tty?
Calling salespersons "salesdrones" is both offensive and incredibly stupid. No salespersons = no revenue = no business for you to sysadmin.
As mentioned hundred times before, OpenOffice works just fine when you need to write a couple of pages every now and then. Typical geek usage, I'd say. In a corporate environment it's just easier to go with the flow. MS Office is the defacto standard. Using it you won't get the ocassional small problems with wrongly aligned pictures or text, or hundreds of annoying tiny problems. Yeah, the world might be a better place if everyone just ignored all the fancy tect formatting and stupid clip art, and focused on the content, but as it happens most managers are on a 6 year olds level, and like the fancy formatting and pictures. So smart people do them. My engineer workmates like to get memos etc. pieces of texts as plain text as possible. And that's what we use internally. Makes it easy to copy/paste, and work with the text. But if we have to present something, Office it is. With big headlines and nicely formatted list filled with hypewords. Works like a charm.
Fans of Terry Pratchett see nothing new or interesting in this announcement,
What? I rather suspect you've never used either.
3.5" floppies were unreliable as all get out. 720k weren't SO bad, but they still often used to fail. 1.44MB were shit awful.
I once had to take a 20-minute train journey to a place where I had access to a printer, print a file, and take the same train back so I could hand in the printed document at my college. I only had enough time to make this trip once, and floppies were the only way of getting the file there. I took 3 different floppies each with a copy of the file on it, in the knowledge that at least one of them would crap out. In fact, two of them did.
I have never, ever seen a failure of any kind on a 360k 5.25" floppy.
tl;dr: you're full of shit.
I have a good name for this new fangled device you are suggesting. You could call it the E-lectronic Typewriter!
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
You're no alone. First thing I thought about reading this interview. Wanted to scream "Are you bloody mad?"
Hope he press Ctrl OP together at times :)
As word-processors go, the old text mode ones rocked. Wordstar was pretty decent and I used it quite a bit back in the day before moving to the pinnacle of word processing, WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS.
I guess the only thing that would make G.R.R. Martin's statement even better is if he was using CP/M instead of DOS. ;-)
David de Groot Snr Systems Engineer
Yes, but a lot of alternatives just miss some functions that you just need or if you are reliant on macro's, well good luck converting all of them to other applications..
Free doesn't always mean better (just like paid isn't always the better one)..
Also having to invest time to get used to the othe application can get costly, if it takes you (in business) a few days/weeks to get used to the 'free' application, it's cheaper to just buy a license..
BUT then again, why upgrade to newer versions if the older versions are doing what you want? Office 2013 isn't more usefull than Office 2007..
He just needs an editor.
Personally I'd love a bluetooth eink thing - slow refresh or not. Tablets with LCD screens suck for battery life and readability.
There must be some sort of hack other than VNC between bluetooth keyboards, bluetooth equipped phones (with wifi) and wifi eink tablets that can get text onto the things. Either that or a serial to bluetooth device on something where the information is available on how to write to the screen.
Nonsense. Make something that's really good and you don't need salespersons.
Mincecraft became a huge hit and generated massive revenues without employing and salespersons.
... why the next installment of GoT is taking so damn long.
HEY GEORGE, WHERE'S MY BOOK? :-)
I don't have a dedicated DOS box. I have a DOS VM running on my server, complete with Wordstar 4.0 and many other programs I used to use back in the 80s and 90s. He's right that Wordstar is a word processor and nothing else. It's really quite powerful at it, too. He's also right that it does exactly what you tell it to do. It does not assume it knows better than you what you are trying to do.
Its not like he can mail somebody a 3.25 floppy! Well, he can, but who could read it?
I think people overestimate how well their own office situation extrapolates to the entire world.
If you don't like Dornish accents you can pound Sand. In fact they may encourage you to.
Here is a very easy way to find anything on the ribbon: Google.
Seriously. If you don't find it in 2 seconds of clicking around, stop and google it. There's nothing wrong with that.
Probably best to avoid using position on the ribbon as a reference. "View" may not be the last tab on the ribbon if:
Developer tab is enabled
Add-ins have ribbon tabs
User has reordered the ribbon
A context ribbon (e.g. Table Tools) is active
Unfortunately the only way to get a document to look the same on any computer (to the highest degree of compatibility) you really need to use PDFs. MSOffice can really screw up the layout of a complex document even within the same version. All it takes is one little difference like margins or font or whatever and your perfectly arranged document flow goes right out the windows. Hell, between MS versions you can get even worse, back when I was in TAFE (basically technical college here in Australia), I was doing my design documents in Word 2007 and when the teacher would open it in the TAFE's 2003 version, all the indentations would be screwed up. I ended up actually writing the documents in 2007, opening them in the then current version of openoffice, fixing the layouts and then saving them again to get them remotely looking the same in 2003.
Bah, you kids and your confounded "logic". :)
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Does your computer load up everything on your hard disk into RAM when you turn it on?
Their bosses.
or joe. You may not write the next Game of Thrones but you can get the same look-and-feel that he's having. Don't forget to unplug that wifi while you-re at it. Oops just had a blonde moment there.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
If it aint broke, dont fix it. ALL hail the 8086.
I tried using Wordstar, and it was far too complicated.
On the other hand, I need to see if I can run my old copy of WordPerfect 6 under wine. Having used Dirt, er, Word, and Open/LibreOffice, WP was the best word processer of them all. (HAD to be 5 or greater; 4 was dreadful.)
The real problems with it:
a) their marketing dept couldn't market their way out of a wet paper bag with the help of the Terminator
b) they were idiots: reveal codes (ALL of them, not just what Word wants to reveal), they could
have printed out as is, and it was pretty close to 1:1 for HTML. EVERY word processor I've tried produces
bloated, overmarked-up crap.
c) Let's not forget that M$ was tried, a number of times, and FOUND GUILTY of bribing OEMs to cut out
the competition. (I know, libertarians think that there's no such thing as "unfair" competition....)
mark
A computer is no more or less a tool than a hammer. Hammers are incredible versatile, of course. They work on nails, but also on just about anything else that requires pounding or crushing. Even skulls. You don't see people (except for hammer manufacturers) getting all giddy and nerdy about hammers because it's not about the tool but what you do with the tool that really matters.
Not enough of us techies understand this. Which is especially problematic now that computers are in Late Adoption phases.
Joe's own editor does most of what WordStar 3.0 did, with a few taints of emacs.
http://joe-editor.sourceforge.net/
Binaries for Linux and Mac OS X, source for the rest.
--
People don't ask me for computer help much any more.
So folks learn LO on their own time? Then it's a win-win if the business dumps 365 and installs LO.
Now that he's using DOS, he'll kill off all the users of DOS.
I once had to support a customer running WordStar on a network. In multi-user installations it had the novel approach of running a discrete copy of the WordStar executable from each user's home folder.
You can imagine, in the days when disk space on your file server was a premium, that this made it just a bit less efficient than WordPerfect, which allowed everyone to share an executable.
George RR Martin is not the only writer to select . . . unusual . . . writing tools.
I suspect that for a number of writers, the tools and the process has an influence on the flavor of the finished text.
Neal Stephenson wrote Cryptonomicon entirely in emacs. And he wrote the Baroque Cycle longhand with a fountain pen.
Use the tools that are appropriate to the task.
friends don't let friends teleport drunk
On an iPAD screen? You're actually serious? And no, it's not a "great digital typewriter", no way in hell actually. Only total idiots would go the iPad way.
For notes maybe, the occasional sentene or sudden enthusiasm which would be even better with pen and paper!
I wouldn't even condider writing anything on a touch screen, if it wasn't necessary