George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series has sold over 25 million copies in North America alone. With each volume weighing in at close to a thousand pages or more, writing each instalment is quite a time consuming process. On Conan O’Brien’s late-night talk show last month, Martin shared why, despite his phenomenal success (or perhaps because of it), he still uses a computer from the 1980s.
For writers wanting to emulate Martin by using his program of choice, Wordstar 4.0 is not currently available for modern operating systems though there are Wordstar emulation programs such as CtrlPlus available. Alternatively, this KAYPRO portable computer with working WordStar software is for sale on eBay for US$125.
Smart guy. Wordstar is the best word processing program ever. Your fingers never have to leave home row and you have many, many features no other word processing program has–all accessible with Ctrl key and the keys starred around the two halves of the home row.
Actually, it’s even better to write with a pencil and then when the paper gets too messy from strikeouts and insertions then type it out.
I will definitely check out CtrlPlus.
Is it because he has a thing against typewriters? If he wanted authenticity, he should be using a scroll and quill. It would be inspiring to say the least. It would take forever though.
The Super Nintendo era was such a great time to grow up in the former United States of America. The early 90’s was a great time to be a kid! It really surprises me how 16-bit game design has not caught on like the over used retro 8-bit has. I was hoping games would start to graduate to the 16-bit era of nostalgia but it has not. Hopefully soon.