George R.R. Martin Uses WordStar 4.0 DOS To Kill Game of Thrones Characters

[nevarran]

Spy on this one, NSA!

p.s.
..."A Song of Ice and Fire books"...
I'll let this mistake slide, because the show is very popular. But come on, man!

 

[Carrots_macduff]

So that's what he looks like.

Huh.

He looks like a lighthouse keeper. Or possibly a tugboat captain.

...

Please tell me I'm not the only one seeing this.

my first thought was train conductor but those work too i guess

 

[Ferisar]

Uh, guys? He's obviously Santa Claus. Come on.

The boat captain shtick is just a cover-up.

OT:
WHAT

That is pretty damn funny, although given his generation's expertise with word processing I'm not surprised he didn't bother to just turn all the annoying junk off in Word. Ah well, whatever suits him. In the end, it's just a piece of software.

 

[Callate]

That's actually kind of a good idea. A DOS computer is much less likely to distract a writer, in addition to the mentioned disconnect preventing viruses. And I can certainly understand how a fantasy writer creating names would find the interventions of spell-check frustrating. I hope he has a decent back-up system for his work, though.

As far as capital letters and mis-spellings go: proof-readers and editors are still supposed to do their jobs, right? And being created on Wordstar 4 doesn't preclude a document being spellchecked by a modern word processor before it goes to press.

 

[J Tyran]

In my experience with old computers is that if they are not dead by now they are probably going to run forever if they are looked after because after several decades of running anything that was going to break would have broken, consumable and wearable parts aside of course.

Fair enough, but still, nothing lasts forever. Mechanical hard drives will wear out with time or, like all mechanical systems (especially rotating ones) subjected to intermittent loads, suffer fatigue.

Yep thats why I added "consumable and wearable parts aside", old HDDs and FD drives do wear and die. If anyone is serious about keeping a vintage computer running you can replace old HDDs with compact flash cards and things, I did dabble with some vintage home computers[footnote]Amigas, I had a nostlagia trip and modded and collected a few.[/footnote] and you can mod them quite a bit.

 

[Davey Woo]

I'm not really surprised. I mean I saw a hipster using a Typewriter in Starbucks the other day (With iPad and iPhone on the table next to it, no, really) and of all the authors I know of (not many to be honest), Martin seems the most likely to use... archaic methods to write his books.

I don't think it's weird at all, like he said it does what he needs it to do, not many of the bells and whistles you get with Office are actually useful for just writing a book.

 

[Strazdas]

So thats why he goes on a rampage of character killing when he gets frustrated by obsolete software hes running. spellchecks and autocorrections can be turned off in a few clicks if thats his problem, the benefits of modern word processing however is not easily replaced in a wordstar.

He looks like a lighthouse keeper. Or possibly a tugboat captain.

lighthouse keeper is the first thing that sprang into my mind whne i saw him for the first time (couple years back). ah, the stereotypes....

Slightly insensitive comment aside, while it's a good idea to keep your work safe from viruses and whatnot it might not be the smartest idea to keep it all on antiquated hardware that might fail catastrophically in hundreds of ways.

actually, old hard drives are safer than new ones in this case. the old drives were still using technology that had far larger magnetic clusters for writing data and less layering, sometimes even single layer. this means that if the machine fails, heck evne if the hard drive itself fails, its far easier and more reliable to recover the data since its easier to scan these drives.

As someone who once tried writing fantasy fiction I have to agree: the red squiggly lines under made-up names can become very, very annoying.

rightclick->add to dictionary. youll never misspell your character names again. as somone with dyslexia - its awesome.