I guess this guy doesn't realize that plenty of modern software does not have spell checking or can be turned on or off.
His editor and publisher can still use the modern tech to do whatever it is you kids use these days to blog your books.
General wisdom in author circles is that you write THEN edit. Having spell check and other tools only hampers the creative process.
Darkroom/WriteRoom (and the dozen+ similar programs created over the past decade or two) http://jjafuller.com/dark-room/ offer zero nonsense, zero setting, zero hassle, text entry programs geared towards authoring a book. They get rid of pretty much everything on screen except for text and background. No UI, no features, nothing. Just the way it should be.
I've used them for NaNoWriMo for years and years.
Quality of writing, to me, is a more important trait of an author than volume of output. It would be nice if he got moving though.
Survivorship bias, sure, but if his writing machine has lasted this long, it's well on the "will last even longer" side of the bell curve.
Writing is an art, the writer an artist. To each, their canvas and brush.
my grandfather used a dos machine to manage the family's finances for years, and in the 90s i insisted, after learning BASIC on that machine, that he get with the times. though i was a linux enthusiast, i just bought him a cheapo emachines at best buy or wal-mart, which my entire family called to pitch in on later. because hey, nothing says happy birthday like diluting your nephew's first and only substantial gift to his stand-in father figure.
anyway, that was a mistake. the new spreadsheet was terrible and actually would not just create new rows like the old one, so after he died i had to go over to my grandmother's house and make a number of new rows that roughly corresponded - whether i liked it or not - to how long i thought she would live. i created rows all fucking day and she unfortunately did not, as far as i know, run out again.
that said, i think george r. r. martin should give a linux box with vga console a shot. without my dos experience, i'd probably never have learned to love the console.