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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 But the truth is that Martin works on an outdated DOS machine using '80s word processor WordStar 4.0, as he revealed during an interview on Conan.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
In one of his books, he also gives credit to the guy that keeps that outdated system running.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.
..it takes him 5 years to write a novel. Now we know why.
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!
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
"It looks like you're trying to write a newsletter about incestuous elves. Would you like assistance?"
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
640k is enough if the processor loads in only part. I remember scrolling in documents of that age in DOS. It was painful. It'd have to read the parts of the document you tried to scroll to. There's no reason you need 640k of RAM to read a 2M file. You just can't have all of it in RAM at the same time. That's how it used to be. The idea of ramdriving every program by loading 100% of every program you are running and 100% of every file used by every one of those programs is silly, but it's the new norm. You don't read what you want, you read it all, even if you don't need it.
Shit like that is one of the many reasons someone might like the "old" way. It was faster/better. He's writing, not doing a global search and replace (which would be painful on something like that),
I have no idea of that's how wordstar did it, but I used some that did, I just don't remember which, as most didn't survive the transition to Windows, so they are gone. No need to indicate experience with Write when nobody has heard of it and will assume I made an error.
Learn to love Alaska
Douglas Adams typed on an Apple IIe. Many authors bring typewriters or other dummy typing devices with them somewhere so they can remove external influences and distractions during their writing time
Wordstar probably has it's own swap file. Most of the heavy-duty DOS word processors did.
640k stopped being a real limitation with DOS 5.0 and the EMS/XMS standards. As long as the words and interface elements currently on the screen fit into 640k, you are fine. Also, if you are in a text-only mode (with a flashing square for a mouse cursor), there are memory hacks that can give you up to 720k of conventional ram, at the expense of losing all graphics ability.
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.
When Smaug came to the Lonely Mountain, he Terminated and stayed resident.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
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.
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.
Just because you have money doesn't mean you need to throw it away on someone who does little more than primary school level maths.
The math is the easy part. But understanding the tax code: now that's a bitch.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
I would be hesitant about classifying him as a 'grumpy old man.' As the interview pointed out, he does use more modern software for non-writing tasks. He simply chooses to use an older computer for his writing because it does what he needs and it doesn't interfere with his work.
The thing with new computers, as with any other technology, is that they have benefits and drawbacks. Writers commonly cite distractions as a problem. These include everything from the urge to edit or format their writing to early, to temptations like the Internet. (Heck, some readers prefer printed books and dedicated ereaders to avoid distractions.) In other cases, writers don't want to mess with their workflow once they have figured out something that works. None of this involves being a grumpy old man, anti-technology, or whatever else you choose to label it as.
The other thing is that we're talking about production machines here. Many people avoid upgrading production machines because there is a lot of overhead to deal with. For example, turning off all of those features is something that you may have to perform with each software upgrade and it is almost certainly something that you have to perform with each hardware upgrade. If you are in the middle of a project, or picking up on an old project, data must be transferred between machines (in the case of hardware upgrades) and there may be issues with the portability of your files between different versions of the software (in the case of software upgrades). While the latter probably isn't an issue for a novelist upgrading between versions of their word processor, it is certainly true for an author who is switching word processors (which Martin would have had to do at some point if he wanted to stay current) and it is true for people who create more complex documents.
Now if Martin was griping about his publisher being unable to handle WordStar documents while expressing a fear of modern computers, you may have a point. The thing is, he isn't. Something tells me that the people who are translating his writing into a book aren't complaining about this quirk either -- if for no other reason than Martin's success.
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.
> 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.
Some authors just keep using what they started with and refuse to progress over a sense of self-superiority. Nothing he is complaining about can't be disabled in Word. Plus he would have features that would greatly aid his writing. He's purposely creating risk unless he prints out his work on paper daily of losing what he wrote. He causes publishers headaches as they have to take his files convert them to something useable. He makes them millions so they allow his 'quirks' but he's probably one of a very very few authors with that kind of pull.
Dos can access a lot more than 640k - the limit on real mode access is 1mb.
True! So, if DOS can access 1 MB, where does the 640K limit come from? Long story short, it's because IBM's BIOS sucked.
Okay, longer story:
Everyone was supposed to use the BIOS for basic operations including writing text to the screen. But the BIOS was poorly designed; the only way it had to write to the screen was to write one character at a time per call into the BIOS. And calling into the BIOS was kind of slow (remember we are talking about computers three orders of magnitude slower than current computers... 4.7 MHz processor).
Since the BIOS was too slow, people didn't use it. Instead, they figured out the address of the screen buffer in the graphics card, and just wrote the desired text directly into the buffer. So much faster!
But this meant that all the most popular software for DOS was not using the BIOS, and had a particular hardware dependency hard-coded. And the standard address for the frame buffer just happened to be 640K. (Well, there were two addresses, depending on whether the user had a mono or color card, but 640K was the lower of the two.) The address was chosen back in the days when RAM was really expensive, and computers might only have 64K or even less. So, nobody saw a problem coming... and besides, everyone was going to be using the BIOS, right? So you should be able to move the graphics card, change the BIOS, and all the software still would work. Whoops.
With the benefit of hindsight, what should have happened was: a DOS program uses the BIOS to query the address of the frame buffer, so the graphics card can move around anywhere in memory. And the BIOS should have had a "write whole string" function from the beginning. (Much later versions of the BIOS had a "write whole string" function but I don't think any popular software ever used it, as it was not available in the giant installed base of old DOS computers.)
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
but here's the thing:
I've not heard anyone describe functionality added to MS Office since Office 2000. Excel has it's uses, but what have they done to it since, except forced people to learn new places for buttons?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Not that I am in love with Microsoft, but Excel has added quite a few "minor" functions since 2000 that dramatically increase usability.
For example, Excel 2007 introduced filtering and sorting by colors. And formats. Coupled with the existing conditional formatting, it significantly improved the ability of the software to sort based on any criteria, without using extra columns.
Going back a bit further, a key feature introduced in Excel 2003 was the ability to import xml datasets, and to set up templates quite easily which automatically imported data from xml files into preset columns. This can be done using macros, sure, but it's a lot easier to use the built in functionality.