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posted by Woods on Thursday May 15 2014, @02:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the they-never-make-them-like-they-used-to dept.

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 But the truth is that Martin works on an outdated DOS machine using '80s word processor WordStar 4.0, as he revealed during an interview on Conan.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

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 15 2014, @02:36PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 15 2014, @02:36PM (#43742)

    I still use Emacs for everything. The only difference is that it's not abandonware. Same keystrokes and usage as when I started in 1991, and I have seen everything else come and go. I have not had to relearn editing and typesetting every few years as fads change.

  • (Score: 1) by middlemen on Thursday May 15 2014, @03:32PM

    by middlemen (504) on Thursday May 15 2014, @03:32PM (#43782) Homepage

    I use vi and not emacs since vi can run on the smallest of Linuxes on the oldest of machines but not Emacs.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 15 2014, @05:22PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 15 2014, @05:22PM (#43819)

      in his face

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 15 2014, @07:03PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 15 2014, @07:03PM (#43882)

      What the fuck. I was drinking lemon juice while reading this thread and your comment nearly made me spill it onto the keyboard.

      • (Score: 2) by EvilJim on Thursday May 15 2014, @09:59PM

        by EvilJim (2501) on Thursday May 15 2014, @09:59PM (#43977) Journal

        my company purchased spill resistant keyboards specifically for this reason :) not sure if I trust the review saying they go through the dishwasher fine though.

  • (Score: 1) by zizban on Thursday May 15 2014, @05:03PM

    by zizban (3765) on Thursday May 15 2014, @05:03PM (#43815)

    Here, have a WordStar mode: http://rig.cs.luc.edu/~rig/home/emacs/emacs-20.4/l isp/emulation/ws-mode.el [luc.edu]

    I use it everyday and I love it!