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.
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.
Ironically, back at the time WordStar considered itself the software that automates writing.
"Don't worry about mistakes, I'll fix them for you!" [1]
says the WordStar 3.3 manual on page 66 in a full page cartoon. Or "Hi, Choose from the menu, and I'll bring whatever you would like to order!" in another one on page 38.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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).
"No settings, no nonsense" is the default for the MANY programs that exist to serve the "distraction free writing" niche.
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 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.
Because the newer stuff probably has at least a few features that will make him more productive in the long run, once he spends the initial time investment to configure the software for his needs.
There is a distinct possibility that modern word processors or text editors actually would be worth the transaction cost, as judged by Martin himself, even though he currently predicts otherwise.
he might, but what if he upgrades his OpenOffice and there's a fucking bug that turns spell-check back on? or upgrades OS X and it starts forcing autocorrect by default into ALL TEXT FIELDS, like his irc client.
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.
For writing long novels on a machine not connected to the internet, upgrades of any kind are just a nuisance. Especially upgrades that require you to restart (this is a Windows machine, after all). The publisher will take care of special formatting, images, etc. Martin just needs to put words on paper without being interrupted and told how to do his job. I can understand his decision.
That is, until you share the Dropbox directory with someone and they delete everything to "save space" on their local disk, because they didn't realize it would "delete it on your Dropbox too". This happened to a creative professional friend of mine, and I'm surprised they're still friends.
That actually sounds like a very reasonable mistake for someone to make. I'm not familiar with exactly how the dropbox UI works (if they would have gotten prompts or warnings), but it does go outside of the typical users mental model if deleting a file on their drive means that the file gets deleted on the server and their friend's PC as well.
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!
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> Did we ever need a v2 for the hammer, or drafting pencil?
Uh, yeah, both the pencil and the hammer not only have gone through multiple iterations over history, but have a branching family tree with real improvements for specific roles over time.
Sure, there's a lot of fluff in software (and all kinds of other products), but technology actually does bring improved tools.
Some of it is driven by available technology. It would have been very hard to have a great spell-check functionality on early home computers, like my 48k Apple II+, simply because of the hardware.
Did we ever need a v2 for the hammer, or drafting pencil?
Hammers did indeed evolve quite a bit from their stone age original form, though the general shape and principle have remained the same.
There is a modern claw hammer halfway up the left side in this illustration from 1514:
Just to be a dick: yes, drafting pencils that are deliberately shaped to not roll off tables are nice, and probably not the absolute first version produced.
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.
It was a separate innovation, followed soon after by a different innovation to combine a claw tool and a hammer tool into a combined tool.
But there are other things you can put on the other end of a hammer besides a claw, none of which made the original hammer a bad idea if all your problems really are nails that you don't need to claw back out.
There may be instances where people stick with something inferior because of inertia or transaction cost, but QWERTY doesn't really deserve to be the poster child for this phenomenon; the often-cited example of market failure in the Dvorak case is not what most folks assume it to be.
.jpg){kind=link}