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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 But the truth is that Martin works on an outdated DOS machine using '80s word processor WordStar 4.0, as he revealed during an interview on Conan.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.'
(Score: 3, Interesting) by metamonkey on Thursday May 15 2014, @02:41PM
Particularly in Martin's case, autocorrect would be terrible. He'd be constantly having to either add words to the dictionary or undo "helpful" corrections, as I don't think there's a Dothraki dictionary for Word.
I, too, miss the days of yore, getting on the IBM clones at my high school and remapping the keyboard via the ANSI files. My favorite was changing the backspace key to now print "DELETION DENIED!" whenever it was pressed.
Okay 3, 2, 1, let's jam.
(Score: 4, Funny) by buswolley on Thursday May 15 2014, @04:46PM
How about this. Without Internet, one can get a lot of work done.
subicular junctures
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday May 15 2014, @06:55PM
True, but any word processor that doesn't let you fine tune or even shut autocorrect off is a poor word processor indeed.
I had some trouble with autocorrect myself a few weeks ago; Oo got weird and started putting strange, wrong quotation marks instead of the expected smart quotes. I finally had to start a new document, write a paragraph, and copy the original document to its beginning. That stretch of the book still does that if I make any changes there. I never saw any of the old DOS word processors do that (and we had quite a few different ones at work).
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org