
Game of Thrones author George RR Martin: 'Why I still use DOS' - sea6ear
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27407502
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Havoc
This is the same reason why I prefer Notepad++ over MS Word for note taking.
Word keeps doing funny stuff with the indents / alignment / styles /
autobullets and sundry garbage that I can't figure out without investing 5
mins per incident. Much easier to use NP++...stuff just works somewhat IDE
like.

~~~
Crito
Yeah, _" What You See Is What You Get"_ is fine for most consumers, but what I
really want is _" What You SAY Is What You Get"_.

I hate using software that second guesses me; more often than not it makes for
a very frustrating experience. It's like having a backseat driver.

~~~
falcolas
Agreed. It drives me nuts how much Safari, Mac Notepad, and Skype try and do
this for me. So many technical terms are corrected to nonsensical words as I'm
typing, with little or no notice. It's ironic to me, because I have to
proofread my comments and technical documents more now than I ever did before
spellchecking was integrated.

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johngalt
Word 2013: File -> Options -> Proofing

Feel free to turn off whatever auto-correction options you like.

From an IT perspective I always find this type of thing interesting. Everyone
is trying to add automation to make things easier for low skill users. That
same automation is exactly what low skill users will fight with relentlessly.
Primarily because people are each so different. The worst thing you can do to
a writer is change what they wrote, but I know hundreds of people who wouldn't
be able to function without spell check.

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pico303
I so get what he's talking about. If I have Word or Outlook erroneously
correct my capitalization or spelling one more time, I'm going to scream. That
functionality is so terrible, yet trying to disable it is like trying to
complete the trials of Hercules.

~~~
pling
Spot on. Outlook 2010 nearly cost me a job when it corrected an Indian
colleague's name to "gang bang" during a paste. That and it perpetually
corrects NuGet to Nugget.

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jblz
The DOS prompt is dark and full of terrors

~~~
Svip
Abort, Retry, Fail?

~~~
redblacktree
It doesn't matter what you pick. It still won't work.

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stcredzero
As far as pure writing goes, there was nothing Bank Street Writer on my old
Apple II+ lacked, aside from spell checking. (I think. It's been so long, I'm
not 100% sure, but spell checking would have been a major chunk of resources
in those days.) When it comes to formatting and presentation, there has been
tremendous progress. Most of the functionality word processors really need has
been around for since the 80's in the mainstream and the 70's in research
labs.

(P.S. I don't think spell checking came around until BSW version 3.)

~~~
acomjean
Well the ][+ did lack lower case characters and only 40 columns of text......
The Apple //e fixed that with a huge 80 columns and lower case!

Spell checking was usually a separate program on a separate disk run as a last
step. I used to use apple writer and apple works and used websters spell
check.

~~~
stcredzero
_Well the ][+ did lack lower case characters and only 40 columns of
text......_

Bank Street Writer got around the lack of lowercase somehow.

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fredsted
Its interesting that some people here actually seem slightly annoyed because
of the tool he is using to write books.

I wonder why that is. I guess I'm guilty of this myself, but often IT people
have a way of pushing software, hardware and other tools on people even though
they don't need it.

~~~
Semiapies
I find it interesting, myself. I'm old enough to have actually used WordStar,
Bank Street Writer, and company on old XTs, as well as their successors up
through the latest versions of Word, and in word processors, there simply
hasn't been any significant advance in the fundamental interface of writing
prose. Laying out a business letter or other specially-formatted document,
maybe. Prose, no.

When writing prose is your primary concern, squiggly lines and auto-correct
and whatnot are simply irritating distractions. Hence the whole stripped-down,
no-distractions word processor niche, especially on the Mac. If you already
_have_ a stripped-down, no-distractions word processor you've been using since
the Reagan administration, you really don't _need_ a new one. Hell, it's why I
haven't used word processors for plain prose in years and just used whatever
text editor I preferred at the time (with the occasional spell-check pass).

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nostrademons
I wonder how he would feel about vim...

~~~
pmelendez
Vim is a text editor and WordStar is a word processor that supports a rich
text format. Although Vim + Markdown would probably do the trick too.

~~~
weinzierl
Also WordStar has its own system of key bindings, powerful and for the writers
need. You could easily count your words with Ctrl+K?, for example.

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izzydata
I guess this guy doesn't realize that plenty of modern software does not have
spell checking or can be turned on or off.

~~~
k-mcgrady
That's no reason to switch. Why switch from a system that works well for you
to one which requires you to configure settings before you can use it?

~~~
izzydata
I was mostly thinking along the lines of what if his machine dies? Instead of
hunting around for old obsolete hardware it would be easier to find modern
hardware that you've adapted to and configured to be as productive as your old
hardware.

~~~
falcolas
The old machine is probably less likely to fail than a newer one. I know of
many machines which are still running today that are 10+ years old.

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.

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odonnellryan
I've always wondered what kind of backups he has.

~~~
ameoba
Backups?

If you lose the outline of a character's life, just kill them off.

~~~
webmaven
...and just paper over the ragged edges by hodoring a few scenes. After hodor,
you hodor the hodor, hodor hodor hodor. Hodor hodor hodor, hodor.

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mfrommil
"no distractions, no internet"

I know there's browser plug-ins to turn off specific sites or the web as a
whole... it would be interesting if microsoft included the functionality in
office. Would have made for much more productive nights writing papers in
college!

~~~
sliverstorm
Yeah, but willpower is still required. You can just disable the plugin.

You're depending on inconvenience to prevent you from web-browsing, and
unchecking a checkbox does not count as "inconvenient enough".

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uvTwitch
It probably helps a lot that the machine and environment he's used to writing
in will have an immense amount of memory associated with writing in that
universe, very intangible benefits that will nonetheless aid in the act of
creation.

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erenemre
Love this. No distractions, no internet, no spellcheck fixing things for you
all the time, no other applications, no stupid notifications trying to steal
your attention. Only him and his words.

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stcredzero
Why do so many in a field that still clings to tools and workflows from the
70's have to ask why George RR Martin uses software from the 80's?

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blakesmith
Video here:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5REM-3nWHg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5REM-3nWHg)

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conradfr
On one hand there's virtue in using a software, methodology, whatever you are
comfortable with and works great (something something PHP).

On the other hand, isn't George RR Martin a bit slow on writing the series ? I
don't read the books but many friends complain about that =)

~~~
speeder
The series actually suffer from... feature creep.

He wrote the start, with a ending in mind (that he still wants to reach), and
he was supposed to write three books.

The problem is that when he ended the first book, the story had not advanced
enough already.

Then when he ended the second book, the story had not advanced enough AND he
created lots of unplanned characters and stuff.

When he tried writing the third book, he decided to "hack", or rather have a
five year timeskip.

Except he noticed that all the new unplanned characters and stuff introduced
meant he would have to figure what everyone did during the timeskip... And he
could not, because they were unplanned in first place, and he could not figure
how to write toward the ending without plot holes.

So he decided to not do a timeskip.

The result was that the book he was outlining as the third book now started to
look like a ridiculous humongous tome, so he decided to divice the third book
in two books that happen in parallel.

Those two books are relased, and now he promised everyone that in the next two
books he will tie up plot points and characters, not open more... Let's see if
he can resist the urge of the feature and scope creep :P (well, as a coder I
can say that resisting the urge to finish features and fix bugs before making
another yet cool shiny feature is something kinda hard :P)

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orenmazor
And now know why it's taken him so long to write each book

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mandelbulb
Meh, only news 'cause it's the GoT writer. Few would care if he wrote on a
typewriter, yet, that's the same as using some old computer,software or both.

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maerF0x0
I wonder how he gets the text file to his publisher? My guess is 3.5"
floppies, but I havent had a floppy drive in my internet connected PC in about
10 years.

~~~
pmelendez
Well you can still run DOS in modern PCs with usb, so my guess is that he
would be using usb drives.

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Nizumzen
More power to him for finding a workflow that works.

The only thing that would stop me from using a similar set up for writing is
that there isn't a DOS version of Spotify :(.

~~~
Semiapies
Run DOS and the word processor in a VM, with Spotify running outside it,
perhaps.

If that's doable, I bet DOS and WordStar (or WordPerfect, etc.) would be
awfully quick in a VM.

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sylvinus
I'd be curious to know how he transfers his files out of the DOS machine then.
I can't remember ever using an USB key with DOS. Floppy disks maybe?

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jc_dntn
Isn't that just being lazy? You can turn off spell/grammar correction in all
versions of Office and open source alternatives, can't you?

~~~
cail
I don't know that lazy is the right word. If he moves to a more modern system
and then turns off all of the modern automatic features and has no use for
anything his current setup doesn't offer it's not really an efficient use of
his time to learn a new system. It's only lazy if we assume there is some
feature that would make him drastically more efficient but the fact is we
don't really know his workflow. Besides, I seriously doubt his word processing
time is the bottleneck in the writing process.

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illuminated
I loved this article.

It works for him. Nothing to fix there. A lot of people around me could learn
something from this article.

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draq
I think this is another example of the QWERTY effect. Obviously, there are
many pieces of word processing software that are superior, but he is so used
to his system that, to him, the transaction cost outweighs the opportunity
cost.

~~~
GuiA
Superior in what way?

It seems that all he cares about is writing text, period. A typewriter is not
good enough because editing is a pain, but Wordstar 4.0 seems to fit his needs
perfectly. How is there anything wrong with that?

A lot of software is novelty-driven, because you need to sell your users on
the next version. Sadly, this is often at odds with the goals software should
aim to fulfill as a tool. Did we ever need a v2 for the hammer, or drafting
pencil?

~~~
chops
I dunno. Did the first hammers have a claw? Because that's a pretty handy
innovation.

~~~
GuiA
There have been clawed hammers since at least 1514:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claw_hammer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claw_hammer)

Clearly, innovation is good - the modern (1514) hammer is better than the big
stone our Homo Abilis ancestors used. But at some point, you reach an upper
bound.

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jesuslop
To run dbase and manage the quantity of characters?

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drd0rk
what about LaTeX?

