George R.R. Martin Writes Everything in WordStar 4.0 on a DOS Machine (2014) | Hacker News Reader

George R.R. Martin Writes Everything in WordStar 4.0 on a DOS Machine (2014)

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32 pointsoptimalsolver46 comments

A big part of writing is getting to "the zone" or "the flow." Many writers use typewriters to ensure that the writing mindset is not polluted by other uses of the same devices. For example, reading news articles on their computer instead of writing, etc. To me, it makes sense for him to use an older computer that is not connected to modern distractions.

It's not just about the choice of software. It's also the feel of the hardware, the way the screen shines differently, the position of the machine in your home.

Some things just can't be replicated using retro-style interfaces on new computers.

It is a question of compartmentalization.

How do you upload it after writing the typewritten version? People don’t really buy scanned typewritten documents anymore

Manuscript to final product is a long pipeline.

You mean every draft is a rewrite, or just that a rewrite at the end is a small amount of work by comparison, or that you only put the final draft on the computer?

It would depend on the author. Some even write their manuscripts in cursive on paper!

I wonder how much of this is a deliberately cultivated form of eccentricity. To be clear, I am casting no aspersions here - use what you wanna use!

But the perfidy of spell check and auto-correct seem like fairly easy problems to avoid if you wanted to use a computer that didn't require you to mail floppies to your publisher. Emacs...vi...nano...even WordPad (it's been a long time since I've used that; maybe it does red underlining these days).

Keyboard shortcuts and lack of distracting internet can also be worked around (emacs has a WordStar compatibility mode because of course it does; it even models WordStar's marker system).

Sure, this takes a small amount of setup but it's not as if maintaining museum-grade hardware/software is hassle-free either. But using DOS and WordStar _is_ a conversation starter and subtly signals that you're important enough of a writer that your publisher will bend over backwards to accommodate you. Shit, whoever Martin's publisher is, I'm sure they'd be happy to deal with cuneiform tablets if that's what the man wanted.

I think the lack of distractions on a dos computer may be another inadvertent advantage of using an old computer. Even more so than we non-authors may think.

Cal Newport’s blog has many interesting stories about writers retreat’s. This seems like a sanctuary, whether intentional or not.

Update: I’m writing a text book right now. I can tell you that publishers do not bend over backwards to accommodate non-standard tool choices (Dropbox Paper in our case). The more you include Microsoft word in your workflow, the easier it will be.

> Update: I’m writing a text book right now. I can tell you that publishers do not bend over backwards to accommodate non-standard tool choices

I think GP is specifically talking about super famous/lucrative writers, not writers in general. (This isn't meant as a slight at all, to be clear; I'm nowhere near George R. R. Martin-levels of acclaim in my field either!)

It’s also what he’s used to and the frustration of learning new tooling provides no advantage for him.

Charles Schultz did something similar with the type of pen he used.

> I wonder how much of this is a deliberately cultivated form of eccentricity. To be clear, I am casting no aspersions here - use what you wanna use!

Probably very little. My guess is he learned WordStar well, likes it, and is too comfortable with it want to "upgrade."

> Keyboard shortcuts and lack of distracting internet can also be worked around (emacs has a WordStar compatibility mode because of course it does; it even models WordStar's marker system).

Spending a bunch of time and effort to find a new tool that works just like your familiar tool seems like more of a techy thing. A lot of people just take the if it ain't broke, don't fix it approach.

> Sure, this takes a small amount of setup but it's not as if maintaining museum-grade hardware/software is hassle-free either. But using DOS and WordStar _is_ a conversation starter and subtly signals that you're important enough of a writer that your publisher will bend over backwards to accommodate you.

This is apparently a picture of him at his computer, and it doesn't look that ancient: https://imgur.com/a/9PITE

And given that he's a writer, he's publishers would probably be just has happy with an ASCII text file as a Word doc.

That sounds about right - expecting predictably unnoticeable latency from typing and predictable interface without updates being forced on you, is a kind of "deliberately cultivated form of eccentricity" :)

Merely using vim does not shield you from occassional bowel movements of the modern OS which introduce sudden infuriating spikes of latency.

I feel him on autocorrect/autocapitalize/spellcheck. I turn that stuff off wherever possible, and if I can't turn it off, I find another application that lets me. Fortunately, those features can be disabled in any decent modern word processor. I don't blame him for sticking with what he knows, without all the other distractions of a modern environment. Who wants their writing session interrupted by 20 popups about upgrading software you didn't even know you were using?

There's many editors with full-screen distraction-free mode. You can also flip the airplane mode. It's really easy to have environment without 20 popups.

There was a big Wordstar thread a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26370252

Also:

WordStar: A Writer’s Word Processor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20898950 - Sept 2019 (1 comment)

WordTsar – A Wordstar clone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17549189 - July 2018 (85 comments, including "My dad, Seymour Rubinstein, created WordStar." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17557412)

WordStar: A writer’s word processor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13899238 - March 2017 (1 comment)

WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13850693 - March 2017 (106 comments)

What ever happened to Wordstar? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12114185 - July 2016 (169 comments)

WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8272952 - Sept 2014 (5 comments)

George R.R. Martin Writes Everything In WordStar 4.0 On A DOS Machine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7744952 - May 2014 (33 comments)

A Song of DOS and WordStar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7732320 - May 2014 (13 comments)

I mean as a general rule you don't expect the choice of software to affect the quality of the writing only the speed with which it gets done, so I guess I'm saying this, on its face, is not very complementary to WordStar 4.0 on a DOS machine.

WordTsar is an open source WordStar http://wordtsar.ca/

Because it works and works well.

Not that there haven't been improvements in word processing programs since, but mostly its been fluff and bad UI.

If you need any good control of page layout and design, DOS-era word processing is going to be worthless or unusable.

Sure, old word processors are perfectly fine for writing a stream of unformatted prose, but so is wordpad, and that’s not even the main task that word processors are for.

What? Page layout and design is not the exclusive domain of software written in the last few years. Wordstar, Word Perfect, Electric Pencil, Display Write and many others programs contemporary to that era gave people enough control to write books, term and research papers, legal documents of every stripe and anything else you care to name. WYSIWYG made it far easier for the general public to perform typesetting tasks but that's not what we're talking about here.

Authors typically do not do page layout and design, that's handled at another level.

However, I was able to manage quite a lot of both using Appleworks on the ][e in the 1980s. Formatting prose (rather than layout) was definitely in the mix: bold, italics, underline, font sizes. I would say that Appleworks made HTML rather easy for me to learn when it first came out, because you had to open and close each formatting option, rather like tags.

TeX's initial release was 1978.

And Troff in 1972. And probably plenty before that....

The way Winds of Winter is progressing, I would believe if they say he is writing on stone tablets.

Last I heard David Brin is running a G4 Mac to run OS 9 to run Word Perfect.

I understand the negative reactions, but I think the fact that new software can emulate the old would be a good reason for young people to not start retrocomputing; it’s not a good reason for an old person with years of experience to suddenly change workflows.

That would require first figuring out how to disable the modern bells and whistles, and then learning to use the new software. Faced with having those productivity interruptions vs not, I’ll probably do the same as Martin when I’m his age.

How's this news? He could be writing in notepad.exe and still make good books.

Heck, probably it's the better choice for durability purposes!

What software is the best to just get out of your way? I’m thinking of setting up a cheap internet-disconnected workspace for writing and modern word processors just annoy me. There is input lag in several of them that there wasn’t decades ago, and a million buttons with awful icons. What do you all prefer?

Probably lots of us use vim. First release of vi is 1976. Emacs is 1976. TeX is 1978.

Sure, but we're not using it on a PDP-11. And we're likely using vim 8 by now.

I also wrote ton of >100 page papers on WordStar 4.0 in DOS. Still remember the very pleasant experience, compared to Windows later, where the max was 50 around pages.

Are there any technical limitations on wordstar? A lot of DOS text editors had a 64k limit, or document+software+(d)os had to fit in 640k.

Now I understand why he takes so much time delivering. It should feel like torture to sit and deal with those CTRL-K shortcuts.

I think someone just needs to confiscate his other computer so he can stop getting new ideas and finish those books. Problem is possibly that the TV show finished them for him making it more difficult to get his version how he wanted it - he maybe should have stayed clear of the show when it diverted so it didn't affect his vision.

I think the e-ink kindles are not as "good" as general-purpose tablets... but they are great for reading.

I'm tempted to revert to WordStar myself, and could even live with 80 columns, but 25 lines is a deal breaker.

Banging out quick text in vi is pretty painless and fmt is your friend to get the line fill right. If I'm in a hurry :1,$!fmt -w 75 means not even leaving the editor.

Anecdotally back when Wordstar was in its heyday people used to ape the name for their products. One of the sales guys I worked with could never stop laughing about a farm management app called Dirtstar.

Why not any one of the new editors which are very basic and can handle any terminal size? Or wordtsar?

Depends what you're writing. For email, I can definitely appreciate a spell checker.

Start an open source project to write the last 2 books for him.

I understood at least five years ago that the series is never going to be completed. Fans will be milked _a la_ Christopher Tolkien ("look, we found a few manuscripted pages that seems to be a draft for a chapter", $20 for 100 pages, hardcover and illustrated), but I won't spend another cent in any Martin book until "Dreams of Spring" is published. And it will never happen.

Also, Martin is 100% against fan fiction, and the main reason is $$$ (he barely conceals it). He would never allow anyone to work on the series unless a load of money is deposited in his bank account. Good for him if he gets it!

Why not use freedos?

Are we still pretending he is still writing stuff?

Oh, he's writing a lot!

Dunk and Egg novellas, a history of the Targaryen family, some new Nightflyer and Wild Cards scripts and pilots, blog posts, responses to fan emails... what more could you ask for?

I'm pretty sure he's not responding to emails on his DOS machine.

After reading the article: no he doesn't, he uses a modern computer for internet, mail and taxes.

It looks like this article is from 2014; I'm not sure if he was still writing them, but we probably were at least still pretending he was!

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