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Game of Thrones Author George R R Martin Writes with WordStar on DOS

Posted by Soulskill on from the change-is-scary dept.

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 But the truth is that Martin works on an outdated DOS machine using '80s word processor WordStar 4.0, as he revealed during an interview on Conan.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.'"

6 of 522 comments (clear)

  1. Also credits the dude that keeps it running by excelsior_gr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In one of his books, he also gives credit to the guy that keeps that outdated system running.

    1. Re:Also credits the dude that keeps it running by mjwx · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I hope he has 50 kaypros or whatever stored in nitrogen somewhere... that can't go on forever.

      I don't see why not. DOS runs fine on modern machines. At some point he may have to switch to emulation, but IA32 emulators should be around for a very very long time.

      I think you could keep a DOS computer running for the rest of G R.R. Martin's natural life... I think I could keep one running for the rest of my natural life and I'm in my 30's. Hardware was a lot less complex and a bit more over-engineered than it is today. Computers weren't low cost commodity items back then.

      However, I dont think emulation is the right way to replace a dos computer, virtualisation is better. You can install DOS in a VMWare VM easily, whilst emulation like DOSBOX is very good, its still has some issues, a VM will get around most, if not all issues you have with dosbox.

      But I'd bet the reason G R.R. Martin has 2 computers with one elusively for writing is more about a habit than an OS. I think he wants his writing computer to be free of distractions and separate from his general use/entertainment computer.

      --
      Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
  2. If it ain't broke, don't fix it by steveha · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  3. Typing "google" into search not a bad idea ... by perpenso · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:Amen, brother Amen! by Zibodiz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Forward it to their grandchildren? Try forwarding it to themselves. I have a lady I support who has literally about 40,000 emails -- all of which are incredibly important -- and when she finds one she wants to keep (as opposed to the ones that sit unread in her inbox), she forwards it to herself so that it's her name in the 'from' field, so it's easier to tell which ones she's seen before and liked.
    When she finds a picture on the internet that she wants to keep, she downloads it to her hard drive, attaches it to an email, then sends it to herself. I kid you not. I've tried to explain how things should be done, but learned the hard way that it's not worth it. Instead we've just switched her to Thunderbird, since Outlook Express couldn't handle that many emails. Thunderbird is holding up under the strain quite nicely. Boy was it hard to get her used to it, though. Probably spent 20+ hours one the phone helping her find the 'forward' button and her address book.

  5. Re:Amen, brother Amen! by Zibodiz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Aboslutely. The other thing that should be taken from this is that things need to change less. Change for improvement is one thing, but change for the sake of change is simply not worth the hassle. When XP support ended, this customer was panicked, and felt that she couldn't stay on XP any longer (thanks, CNN), but she is so averse to change that I knew Windows 7 would not be a good change. I set her up with Lubuntu, customized everything to look as close to XP as possible, and still had tons of greif to deal with. In the end, though, it was a very smooth transition; everything she did in XP was possible in Lubuntu, icons were in the same places, programs worked the same. She fussed -- a lot -- about the fact that some of the fonts weren't identical (which would have been worse in Wn 7), and that the desktop icons were slightly larger than in XP, but otherwise things went well.
    I definitely appreciate how projects like Lubuntu have given us the ability to 'hold back time', as it were, for folks who simply cannot handle change. And as a bonus, I successfully converted someone to Linux. Man, I prefer supporting Linux boxes over Windows. So much easier to fix.