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 But the truth is that Martin works on an outdated DOS machine using '80s word processor WordStar 4.0, as he revealed during an interview on Conan.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

16 of 522 comments (clear)

  1. Amen, brother Amen! by Qbertino · · Score: 5, Insightful

    '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
    1. Re:Amen, brother Amen! by AaronLS · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Hallelujah! Trying to select text and it grabs the whole word, or worse, some programs grab the whole word plus a space. Why do I want trailing spaces with everything I paste?

      As a developer thinking about how I can "help" the user, I always favor the perspective that the user knows what they want.

      Some developers make the "they can disable this feature" excuse. The frustrating thing is every time you get a new desktop/phone/upgrade/update you find yourself disabling the same options again and again. Only a small handful of products remember these kinds of settings across devices/installs.

    2. Re:Amen, brother Amen! by i+kan+reed · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Amen, brother Amen! by master5o1 · · Score: 5, Funny

      Type 'Google' into Bing bar to get Google to search for 'Hotmail' to look at their email and then forward it to their grandchildren.

      --
      signature is pants
  2. 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 Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 5, Funny

      Poor guy has to dick with GRRM's autoexec.bat and config.sys every time he adds a new feast scene.

  3. And.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    ..it takes him 5 years to write a novel. Now we know why.

    1. Re:And.... by NotDrWho · · Score: 5, Funny

      He keeps loosing his new chapters. If you're going to try for a second side on your floppies with a hole punch, you take your chances.

      --
      SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
  4. The Good Old Days! by cogeek · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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."

    1. Re:The Good Old Days! by Stormy+Dragon · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I still miss Reveal Codes.

  5. 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
    1. Re:If it ain't broke, don't fix it by nospam007 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "WordStar is notably lacking in support for extended characters of any sort."

      Like Slashdot 25 years later?

  6. The Clippy version by Snufu · · Score: 5, Funny

    "It looks like you're trying to write a newsletter about incestuous elves. Would you like assistance?"

  7. Shut up..... by Dareth · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  8. Re:somebody make a dragon for dos joke by geekoid · · Score: 5, Funny

    When Smaug came to the Lonely Mountain, he Terminated and stayed resident.

    --
    The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  9. Re:Why do people still pay money for basic softwar by Tablizer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.