Game of Thrones written on brutal medieval word processor and OS That Game of Thrones author George R R Martin writes his tomes and scripts using WordStar has been common knowledge for a while: he blogged about it back in 2011 . Yesterday the chronicler of the cruel pseudo-medieval Seven Kingdoms popped up on US chat show Conan and explained why. As you'll see in this excerpt from the …
Do you think someone should tell him you can turn those options off?
Though I guess not having the option to browse the internet and stare at cat pictures all day helps with the focus, all that incest* doesn't write itself..
(*I've only watched the first episode of GoT but presuming it's a common theme judging by it being the majority of the pilot)
>uploaded it by bicycle
Luxury! I had to hand-assemble the metal atoms into viable form then persuade 500 cats to carry them to El Reg!
How many I'll get back after the Vultures have finished with them is anybodies guess. Or how many less vultures El Reg will have after meeting the cats..
I still have my original installation disks for WS ... and I agree with his choice. When you are a writer (as opposed to some hacker who grew up on Word) then WS allows you to just write - it does exactly what you ask it to do.
Suddenly my interest level in Game of Thrones is increased ... I might even read one of the books - but watching it ... that's a bridge too far at this point.
RE:"Suddenly my interest level in Game of Thrones is increased ... I might even read one of the books - but watching it ... that's a bridge too far at this point."
Beware. I resisted this pathetic fad until season 3 had ended. I looked with pity and condescension, and a small amount of derision, upon all those gullible fools who sat glued to their TV screens and filmed themselves doing so. I watched the viewer reactions to the "Red Wedding" episode with amazement and incomprehension. WTF is wrong with these people?
Then, out of curiosity, I watched episode 1 of the first season. Hmmm. Just one more perhaps. Before I knew it I was at the last episode of season one and desperately seeking the rest.
This thing is extraordinarily involving and addictive. Now I watch season 4 as it happens then go and read what other afflicted have to say about it on my favourite Guardian blog. Oh, the outrage when spoilers were emitted after... And the joy of those who have read the books watching the reactions of their spouses to certain events and claiming it as the highlight of their week. And... Ahem.
Beware. Its a virus and it will infect your brain regardless of your resistance to such societal phenomena. I am a pathetic husk of what I used to be and will sit discussing it with my wife, who has read the books, trying to goad her into spouting spoilers and sticking my fingers in my ears when she bursts and cannot help herself any more...Very sad.
I wrote my project on the CPC6128 in Protext as well.
It was either that of DisplayWrite IV on the PCs in the labs.
Later on I had to do a migration from DW IV to WP 5.1 for a company. It is amazing how hard people will fight to stay with what they know. The finance department complained about the high level of support calls the company were being charged for. We then pointed out that the Finance director's PA was responsible for 70% of the calls and it was always the same thing - the converter was US based and converted all documents to Letter sized paper.
She had a training course, where they were told about this and told to set it to A4 the first time they edited the document (the company chose the tool, so it wasn't "our" problem), but the PA thought that if she made enough support calls, they would switch back to DW IV. Funny, after the director had a quiet word with her, the support calls dropped of by over 60% the next month.
Those of us who remember 16 bit / 8 bit word processing know what he is talking about. Modern word processors take up your time and intrude on your concentration with a thousand formatting trivialities. In a way they make you do more work, not less.
I wonder what El Reg writers use. Formatting is a non-issue for them I guess. And why should professional writers also be professional formatters ? Personally I do it all by sense of smell.
For just entering and reviewing text, you only want a good keyboard and an uncluttered display. If I had only to transcribe my imagination into text, I would be happy with GRRM's setup. Internet is a distraction.
Does Wordstar have an 'autosave' feature'? I would just have to get back into the habit of using a keyboard shortcut at the end of every paragraph.
Though I do rather like the 'document map' feature in Word, I understand that GRRM employs a super fan to help with character continuity and the like.
The author Will Self uses a typewriter. He explained that if he were the write "A maroon car sped by..." he won't be tempted to waste time by popping back to make it a "burgundy car", as he might if he were using a word-processor. He doesn't need a UPS or autosave feature, he can't accidentally save an edited version over an original etc... True, he might lose his draft in the case of a house fire or burglary, but these events are rarer than a BSOD or a file management error on the part of the user.
I had tried convincing the OpenOffice folks (pre-LibreOffice) to include an "unformatted" editing option in the wordprocessor (and even spreadsheet) modules. Something like the "text-only" editing mode in WordPerfect 5.x for Windows. In WP5.x it was a mode that would look like the old DOS non-GUI version, where you had simple monospaced text, and the only clues to formatting were text/background colours.
Those of us who remember 16 bit / 8 bit word processing know what he is talking about.
Indeed. When I'm writing creatively I use Sublime (with syntax highlighting turned off, naturally) for the same reasons he uses WordStar. Granted no one's ever going to buy the stories I write even if the few people I share them with enjoy them, but the point still stands.
"I wonder what El Reg writers use."
Can't speak for anyone else, but I can tell you what I use. 50% of my writing is done using my personal Server 2008 R2 VM with a heavily customised version of Word 2010*.
The ribbon bar was completed excised from the application. I have disabled most "features" and "formatting" bits. For all intents and purposes it is an instance of Notepad with spell check, a decade's worth of custom dictionary, word count (very important!), version control and the ability to pass the document back and forth to my colleagues and get feedback via comments, change tracking etc.
About 30% of my writing is done in LibreOffice writer 4.2, which is what I run on my netbook. In every way that matters to me it is identical to Office 2010, and superior in a few ways. The only reason I haven't switched away from Office entirely is apathy. Office 2010, modified to meet my needs, works and works well. A properly set up LibreOffice would work well too, but that would require reconfiguring what I have, so I'll probably just run both on different machines until end-of-support for Office 2010 makes me switch.
The other 20% of my work occurs in Google Docs, though this is increasing. To put it bluntly, if there is going to be collaboration outside of my company, it's almost always going to be Google Docs. It seems to be what my clients use.
I should probably point out that the peculiarities of The Register's CMS mean that it is simply cheaper (time-wise) and easier to write everything in HTML. I don't use features like "bold" or "italics". I write my formatting in raw HTML for every single article, whitepaper and so forth.
Maybe these newfangled productivity suites with their newfangled interfaces and auto-helping default settings have a purpose for some/most/everyone-who-is-not-me. Can't speak to that. What I can say is that I've been using productivity suites since I was three years old. I cut my teeth on things like Wordperfect 5.1. When I write, I want to write. I don't want to think about "where is command X?" or "why is it doing that now?".
I want to know where my controls and commands are. I don't want it to auto-format or reconfigure a single thing. If I want formatting, I'll code it. If I want a command, I'll go where I have gone for the past 30 years of my life.
The future and all it's touch-enabled, auto-assisting, Clippy-friendly 0.8px-after-your-paragraph interfaces belongs to a newer generation. It is for people who are not me; those who grew up mashing txt msgs into their keypads and relying on T9 predictive text. Those who instinctively trust the computer to "get things right".
I don't. I can't. It's not in me. So what do I write on? That which feels familiar, comfortable and safe**. The future and all it's children can have the rest.
*I upgraded from Windows XP and Office 2003 only about three months ago.
**The religious wars are for those who don't make a living off of their writing.
What do Reg writers use?
I use OpenOffice 4.0. Previously I used Lotus Symphony. Once that code went into OpenOffice and MacOS X Mavericks borked Symphony, the jump was easy.
I spent years in MS Word: it crashed very regularly about six hours into my work day, mangled text formats, was horrible to use with columns or images and generally made my life miserable if I tried to do anything more than just type. In other words, WYSIWYG made my life hell.
Having said that, I no longer try to do any WYSIWYG. So maybe OpenOffice is just as bad once I push it beyond basic text.
Ah but the thing is, when you're writing you don't want to be distracted by petty things like spelling and grammar. That's something you worry about when you're editing afterwards (before you send it to the editor for ritual dismemberment).
Writing and editing are fundamentally different modes of thought. When you're writing you don't want to be interrupted, and the squiggly red lines and things are all distractions that interrupt the flow of your thoughts.
"Though I guess not having the option to browse the internet and stare at cat pictures all day helps with the focus, all that incest* doesn't write itself.."
It is also the only way to really secure your system from outside attacks. If you make your living writing books then you REALLY don't want people to steal them. So securing your work in a system not connected to any network is a really good idea.
"all that incest* doesn't write itself"
Nah, that's not the core of the plot, it is more about paedophilia and reinforcing the misguided notion that teens getting married was the norm in days gone by. It was picked up by the producers for the amazing number of scenes containing nude or partially nude under-age girls (even if the actresses actually aren't, the characters they are portraying are = a very weird kind of paedophillia).
I think the books would have been 1000% better if he had used a more up to date word processor that auto-corrected the names, his character names are often just ridiculous corruptions of modern names that just make reading them awkward.
>the misguided notion that teens getting married was the norm in days gone by.
Strangely enough, I remember one person coming up with this same dumb argument on rec.arts.sf.written
Easy enough to check, at least for the nobility, so I went and looked up Wikipedia entries for French kings and queens in the 1400s. They indicate date of birth and marriage date.
Not unexpectedly, your opinions notwithstanding, there were lots of early teen marriages. I did not, but it would be easy to do, think of looking up the birthdates of the resulting children, which would indicate a minimum for when the marriage was consummated.
Given a fully hereditary dynastic political system must have been tremendous pressure to have children as early as possible.
Dani getting married at 13 is not really unusual for the times. Anyway, a significant component of the plot is that Viserys is really being a bastard marrying her off that early. Having her get married at 20 would kinda nullify that component.
Last, getting married at 13 when the average life expectancy is 35 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Life_expectancy_variation_over_time) makes a fair bit of sense.
Even if a good chunk of deaths probably happened at childbirth as well. Waiting till 25 for would mean you might very well not rear your children to adulthood.
Very happy that childhood is better protected now, but mores and circumstances were different then so nothing wrong with a work of fiction depicting things as they were. Though there would be plenty wrong with graphic descriptions of the ensuing sex.
The 'age' of the characters is irrelevant, the book is set in a fantasy world where there are dragons and magic and shit, there is no reason why their years == our years.
Timing is weird in Westeros - a good definition of a year is the time passing between seasons until you return again to the same season, and it has been "summer" for (at least) the past "15 years", so how a Westeros Year is defined is unknown.
Arya is 9 at the start of the books, Jon Snow 15. Do either Maisie Williams (17) or Kit Harrington (27) look 9 or 15? By the end of book 5 (maybe equates to season 5/6), they should be 11 and 17.
My conclusion is that Westeros years are longer than Earth years.
"the misguided notion that teens getting married was the norm in days gone by".
How do you figure that? There's still plenty of places on the planet where it is *still* the norm. I was staying in such a place in 2005. There was some disapproval of a wedding going on in the next village. Because the bride was twelve, IIRC. They felt that was too young. But fifteen would have been seen as perfectly normal. Eighteen probably counted as "stuck on the shelf". Meanwhile I think that boys were expected to become working adults at about sixteen, the Big Men of the village were in their late thirties, and anybody over about fifty was past it.
In short, everything happens much much sooner. Maybe it's because of the low life-expectancy alone, or perhaps the subsistence agriculture and low levels of education come into it too.
"Nah, that's not the core of the plot, it is more about paedophilia and reinforcing the misguided notion that teens getting married was the norm in days gone by."
It may not have been the norm in the general population but it certainly was in the aristocracy. Most marriages of the upper classes were made for political or business reasons.
Paedophilia is a sexual attraction to prepubescent children. Most of the teenage marriages in the books in the books show people as being unhappy with the situation but going through with it because it is their duty. As far as I can remember there are only 3 characters who are sexually attracted to their teenage brides:
- Craster, who has a hareem of his own daughters and is reviled by all the other characters in the books.
- Walder Frey, who is married to a 14 year old and regarded as a lecherous old man.
- Khal Drogo, who marries Daenerys.
Of those three only Khal Drogo is portrayed in a favourable light. This is only because most of what we know about him is relayed to us through the eyes of Daenerys who is likely suffering some form of Stockholm syndrome. Khal Drogo is by no means a nice person, he just happens to treat her better than her brother did.
...Macintoshes are brutal and clunky. Seriously! I let the design department talk me into installing two teaching labs of the maliciously-crippled things (on the - obviously outdated - assumption that an OS was an OS and it really wouldn't matter much), and am now stuck with them for another 2 years (well technically, the students are stuck with them - it took me 2 weeks to get sick of the one in my office and have it replaced with a Win7 machine - and those who know me know I am a Linux fanGrrl).
Nonsense. The good author needs to witness the power and ease of use a Macintosh 128K. The 512x382 screen resolution in black and white will please him and the sturdy 400K floppies (if he can still get them) will hold many, many pages of text.
To make it even sweeter, it comes with its own writing program, MacWrite.
He's to get in contact with the charismatic young Steven P. Jobs in California. Now, there's a go-getter if ever there was one.
Once Martin has used a Macintosh, he'll never go back.
Macintoshes are brutal and clunky. Seriously! I let the design department talk me into installing two teaching labs of the maliciously-crippled things (on the - obviously outdated - assumption that an OS was an OS and it really wouldn't matter much), and am now stuck with them for another 2 years (well technically, the students are stuck with them - it took me 2 weeks to get sick of the one in my office and have it replaced with a Win7 machine - and those who know me know I am a Linux fanGrrl).
I'm inclined to agree. The learning curve on a Mac is pretty brutal by comparison to the one on Linux or even Windows. Add to that the fact that Apple assumes all their users are idiots and you've got a recipe for a terrible OS, at least for those of us who are used to being able to dig into our machines as deeply as we choose.
Latex is unfortunately a bit of a learning curve, but exceedingly useful for mathematics statements - oh and some graphs (I mean theoretic graphs not plots).
I am using Libreoffice and Latex plugin for my thesis, and I can tell you it makes life much easier (Latex output is embedded as PNG, as SVG is a bit broken).
In fact, SVG is a wonderful idea , but high res PNGs (min 300 DPI), have made my life a lot simpler.
A shout out for the cairo tools...
P.
LaTex?
Surely that kind of stuff is what editors and type setters are for?
I think the WordStar thing is perfect - he puts down the text in as minimal a way possible and those people paid to convert that into a published work, well, convert it into a published work. That seems and efficient and sensible division of labour to me.
You don't know anything John Snow.... don't confuse the tool and the product !
If you enjoy the story who cares if RR Martin wrote it on a i-pad or chiseled it on a roll of bog paper with a toothpick?
If the "value" of the tool had anything to do with the quality of the writing then all the mont-blanc toting corporate drones and i-pad swinging hipsters would delight us with literary masterpieces....(ahem)
Besides give the guy a break - he predicted the digital revolution in Westeros... "Windows is coming !"
Well, one of the few complaints about GRRM is that it takes him an inordinate amount of time to write any one of his books. He apparently finds it hard to keep track of all the different stories going on, and is constantly editing and rewriting and moving bits around - I think I read somewhere that a typical writing day for him is 30 minutes new stuff and 8 hours editing.
Normally I'm quite happy to let artists do their artistic thing, but two things worry me about GRRM:
1) He's getting on a bit, and he's not exactly svelte. He takes, on average, 6 years for a book and he's got at least 2 left to write.
2) He's signed away the story of ASOIAF to the GoT crew, including the basics of the next two books. If GoT get to the end of book 5 (as a source; they've stopped following the books except in spirit) before book 6 is released, then spoilers will be in GoT and not ASOIAF.
Almost right. When GRRM started ASOIF he was churning out the books at a reasonable rate: 2.5 years 'tixt books 1 and 2, then 1.5 years between books 2 and 3. Then I think his concentration must have wandered a bit, though, as between books 3 and 4 it took him 5 years, then six years to write the last one.
Your points do stand, though. He's certainly no spring chicken, nor particularly athletic. As for the TV series: I nearly stopped watching after S4 E5 because of the fluff they made out of Jon's and Bran's stories. :(
Last book I bought was book #4 and I am sticking to HBO until all the books are done.
I've loved GRRM's books since the mid 80s, starting with Sandkings. But in a way, he's a victim of his own success. Previously, he was a niche author, known and appreciated by a limited audience. I'd guess his biggest success to date had been Fevre Dream.
With GoT he has the well-deserved opportunity to make a lasting name for himself, but every indication is that he is a bit paralyzed by it. Gradually increasing book sizes and dwindling plot advancement. Writing and re-writing chapters endlessly, taking years to complete books. Worrying about continuity excessively (there's a bit somewhere about a fan having pointed out how a character's horse changed color, oh woe). Endless reissues of past material and penning of new, non-GoT, material such as the Jack Vance Dying Earth anthology.
The straw that broke the camel's back was my reading a LiveJournal blog when he stated that he'd read most posts in a 500+ thread before replying.
I hope for the best and I wish him the best, but I am relieved HBO is involved. They've done a stellar job adapting so far and hopefully they can carry out a suitably glorious conclusion if he is not able to.
My next door neighbor still runs dos 3.1 with wordstar for all his docs and still commits the files to floppy disks. (Mind it never BSOD but the parts for the 486 are getting hard to come by)
He does have a xp machine for his internet and emails (Outlook Express)
Bear in mind he is 72
And he also has a Windows 95 Machine doing something (Search me what)
That much!
I think that you will find that DOS 6 will run on anything newer than an 8088 with ~1MB of RAM or even less. Windows 3.1 needs a 80286 as a minimum and at least 1MB IIRC.
And with Wordstar 4.0, such a machine would probably still be faster to use than Word 2013 on an i5 at 2.6GHz!
My vote is to write the text in Emacs using Troff and Memorandum Macros.
Yeah, my first DOS machine was a 386, 2 MB of RAM and a 50 MB hard disk.
I just mentioned the P-2 hardware since you can pick up a pallet of them for under a hundred dollars from surplus places and with spare parts being very plentiful, they make a perfect machines for a role like this and you can run them for many years without much of a problem.
I picked up about 20 of the machines and a large box of miscellaneous parts for just over $100 from my local school, I only plan to use 2 or 3, so I can cannibalize the remainder to keep me running for many years to come, something I can't really say about modern systems
It's possible for a simple Linux installation to provide the required magic of a connected machine, while running joe in a full screen terminal or a simple CTRL-ALT-F2 for the full command line experience. joe uses wordstar commands,* and yes, I admit it's one of the first things I install along with mc to get some work done.
* - When you're on a machine without joe. using something like nano, there's more magic as entire lines can disappear. This is apparently caused by your fingers automatically going CTRL-K, CTRL-X, deleting text for some weird unexplained reason
I imagine one of the benefit's of his setup, however, is a machine 100% dedicated to writing - no flicking between windows or sessions, just a (digital) page and pen.
That you can replicate the WP in a full-function machine is perhaps missing at least part of the point.
If you asked me how to do something is Wordstar, I probably couldn't tell you, but if you sat me in front of a computer, I could probably do it without thinking.
I recall that in the days before standard GUIs, a good bet was "when all else fails, try Wordstar commands".
Memo to self: Must install joe.
If you asked me how to do something is Wordstar, I probably couldn't tell you, but if you sat me in front of a computer, I could probably do it without thinking.
Back in the '80s, I used to do tech support for WordStar, so I had to know it.
Once you've got over the initial pain of working out how dot commands work, it's actually a very good word processor.
Years later, I chose a text editor called QEdit, mostly because it used WordStar commands :-)
Vic.
WordStar has one (of many) great feature which is that if you can't quite remember the command, then you could press CTRL-K and then pause for half a second or so and it would display the help screen. You could then press the letter for the command ('X', say) and it would then carry on as if you had pressed CTRL-KX in one fluid action.
Does Joe do this? (I couldn't see it in a brief scan of the web)
Its a serious arrogance and a logical error to assume modern is better than old.
He isn't typesetting, he just needs to record words. He isn't embedding spreadsheets into documents or designing network diagrammes. It's difficult to see what Word 2013 offers that Wordstar can't do.
I suspect vim would also work as well.
If what you have does what you need, there's little point wasting time learning something new.
He might have one of those nice old IBM clickity-clack keyboards too. :)
I went through a phase of writing in plain text in Visual Studio (already installed for development purposes). It was TFS version-controlled, and had one project for the text (folders per chapter, each containing scene text files) whilst another project held a console app that combined the text of the first project into a an EPUB by hitting F5 (also automatically creating a stats html page as a by-product).
Whenever I started a new work, I just added another project for it.
Worked well, until I went Mac.
That's the beauty of an off net DOS box. As for Wordstar, well why not? I doubt someone who writes novels and scripts cares about what style to use for the next paragraph. Then again, we have a very modern problem. Too many people no longer understand the distinction between content and presentation.
Got it in one.
And the major culprit? Let me think; a word processor that instead of enforcing a style and requiring that the style be edited to manage the look of a document, allows modification of text on a character by character basis, using invisible controls. I wonder where I can get one of those?
Truly it is said that a word processor does for words what a food processor does for food...
Reading this I (rather idley) tried to work out how much time I wasted when I was in an office dealing with problems that I and my team met using Word's supposedly intelligent features. [ Let alone the time wasted making a document look amazingly good so that it could be printed and stuck in a file, never again to see the light of day.] I couldn't.
I'd love to use WORD for DOS again, though. To be honest 90% of the time I don't use any features it didn't have.
Basic formatting when I wanted it, and the whole programme fitted on a single floppy, complete with a few files.
The worst time waster since then has always been the mysterious format changes. For no reason that the user can see a block of text will suddenly move 1 tab to the right, or change size or font. Or make strange pagination changes for no apparent reason.
Then there was Word's strange inability to insert a bit of text at the top of a page if it needs to start above a table. Something that has carried on through all the versions I've used.
I'm so glad you said that. What was better in Word Perfect was the reveal codes so you could fix the horrible things the software did to formatting. That is, if you needed formatting at all. The weird stuff Word does to lists and numbering drove me nuts. Plus once you got used to reveal codes, HTML was a piece of cake.
@Neil Barnes
With the disclaimer that I believe WordStar on DOS is an excellent choice for a writer, I am going to stick up for MS Word.
I use several different programs depending on what I am writing/laying-out but Word is a super handy staple of my day. It's not the quickest, it's not the best for consistency, nor for working with flowing text and anchoring images. BUT, it is very versatile and is great for the miscellaneous every-day tasks that one uses a word-processor for.
And that's the point - it's all about matching the need/use-case (and budget) to the best program. When I need to script, I use an enhanced text editor (my choice is Notepad++), when I need to lay-out a document that will be printed and needs to look professional, I turn to my trusty CS2 version of InDesign, when I need to lay content out in a very structured way without having to worry about indenting and sub-heading formatting, I use a LaTex package.
BUT, when I want throw together some information quickly with 'good enough' formatting and perhaps a few images, then I use Word.
If I need to put together a quick set of instructions for my team, I use Word. If I need to stick a note on the noticeboard or on a box, Word. When I need to take notes while researching something, Word. And so on.
That said, I prefer different versions of Word for different tasks - I find Word 98 (which I use at home) to be better for creating styles and getting a consistent look that I can control. Word 2007 (which I use at work) seems to want to force me into using what it considers appropriate.
Even then, that difference means that I can very quickly knock out something that is formatted acceptably for those times when fine-tuning the styling isn't necessary, which, to be honest, is the vast majority of the time (for me).
@Dan1980 - I can't argue. For most of the day to day tasks where the format is not important, Word, in pretty much any of its versions, is fine. I'm ignoring the mess it makes of lists and bullets...
My argument is that a poor decision twenty or thirty years ago landed the world with a word processor that could do too much; the ability to change styles on the characters individually means that people use it like that, and the result is documents with a mish-mash of styles. We've also ended up with other editors that work the same way, because people are familiar with it... there's nothing I like more than spending a week with a thousand page document full of images and tables where every page has a dozen different styles, none in common with the pages preceding or following. For that it's the wrong tool, but people are resistant to using the right tool.
Had MS chosen instead to implement something along the lines of LyX, which *only* allows the style to be changed, but which with a well-written style doesn't need anything else, things might have been different. With Word, most people have not applied the concept of structure to the document; if it looks like a header, it'll do... that makes it tricky to change format, among other things - and there's a semantic difference between a header, and something that looks like a header.
Too many people no longer understand the distinction between content and presentation.
Perhaps that's because there is no such thing as content perfectly separable from presentation. [1][2]
[1] - http://rhetcomp.gsu.edu/~bgu/8121/TCQ-CMS(Clark).pdf
[2] - http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/11/14/separating-presentation-from-content/
Perhaps that's because there is no such thing as content perfectly separable from presentation
Zounds! A groundbreaking discovery - good thing you used boldface there. And when concerns can't be "perfectly" separated, we shouldn't try to separate them at all, eh?
As Clark points out, the rhetorical force of presentation has pretty much always been a concern for rhetoric; certainly it goes back to Aristotelian rhetoric, as anyone with a passing familiarity with the Aristotelian canons knows, and other ancient rhetorics similarly pay attention to the subject.1 But the great majority of rhetoricians have also recognized content and presentation as functionally separable for most purposes, even if interdependent. Clark himself notes in his introduction: "I am not, after all, convinced that attempts to separate content from presentation are
wrong" [emphasis in original].
Similarly, Cook writes: "presentation and content cannot be entirely separated" [emphasis in original] and "The principle of separating presentation and content is admirable". Of course Cook is a mathematician; he doesn't work in rhetoric or a cognate field,2 and hasn't done the kind of research that Clark has, so his opinion is largely anecdote and he's not concerned with making any sophisticated argument on the subject in that post.
1See for example the discussion of use of rules in Hoskisson & Boswell, "Neo-Assyrian Rhetoric".
2Me? I have an MA in Rhetoric, as well as degrees in CS and English. I've presented at academic conferences on visual rhetoric, and specifically on the rhetorical force of presentation elements in political web pages. My wife's a major rhetoric scholar, as are several of my friends. So I have spent a little time studying the subject.
http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_mac_vs_pc.html
Umberto Eco was writing this article around the Dos/Wordstar era.
His novel Foucault's Pendulum has a plot that involves computers and some cryptography (from memory). All DOS. The REPL may need explaining to younger readers.
In William Gibson's Pattern Recognition set in the near future, the cool people are using 'vintage' computers. High prices for Cubes and older laptops, sold by shady dealers in physical markets (he got that one wrong). Computers are reaching the computing power thresholds needed for most tasks, and the market is hitting saturation, replacement only. One hopes for computers designed to last a decade or so.
"dealers in physical markets (he got that one wrong)"
Did he? iirc the vintage computers tend to be used for nefarious purposes, or have been, so there is an element of shady about them.
I suspect if I was looking for something shady, I'd end up meeting in person to get it, people dealing drugs and guns didn't get tracked when silkroad went down.
Anon for obvious reasons.
That Umberto Eco piece is excellent! An excerpt, the bold emphasis is mine:
Friends, Italians, countrymen, I ask that a Committee for Public Health be set up, whose task would be to censor (by violent means, if necessary) discussion of the following topics in the Italian press. Each censored topic is followed by an alternative in brackets which is just as futile, but rich with the potential for polemic. Whether Joyce is boring (whether reading Thomas Mann gives one erections). Whether Heidegger is responsible for the crisis of the Left (whether Ariosto provoked the revocation of the Edict of Nantes). Whether semiotics has blurred the difference between Walt Disney and Dante (whether De Agostini does the right thing in putting Vimercate and the Sahara in the same atlas). Whether Italy boycotted quantum physics (whether France plots against the subjunctive). Whether new technologies kill books and cinemas (whether zeppelins made bicycles redundant). Whether computers kill inspiration (whether fountain pens are Protestant)...
....I asked above whether fountain pens were Protestant. Insufficient consideration has been given to the new underground religious war which is modifying the modern world. It's an old idea of mine, but I find that whenever I tell people about it they immediately agree with me.
The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ratio studiorum of the Jesuits.
"computers designed to last a decade".
No, Microsoft will ensure that the OS is obsolete, unsupported and vulnerable to malware before 10 years is up, and what they replace the OS with will be guaranteed not to work on older systems.
Joke? Maybe not!
I can empathise with George Martin. Word processors can be distracting with all their bells and whistles to make your prose pretty (Or trying to make you write in a style that they think is correct)
I tend to do my main writing (not that I'm an author!) on a simple text editor. Once I have the content, I'll then copy and paste it into, say, LibreOffice, to put a few small bits of formatting on.
you mean where Caps Lock is now?
Yah. The WS command keys make more sense when you realise that you weren't supposed to have to contort your hand to keep the little finger down on the bottom left of the keyboard.
I used to have a TSR that swapped them for me. Gawd, that's going back a bit. A bit a of Ctrl+Q, R in fact :D
T
S
R
I bet half the programmers these days don't even know what that stands for. Lucky buggers :D
I've watched the video and he says he's not worried about viruses because he uses DOS?
Surely he jest? I've bad memories of Denzuko, AirCop and AntiCMOS (the last one was even introduced by a copy of WordStar my mom brought home from work! those were the days where stuff is saved on those black, filmsy 5.25" floppies with an effective storage area of 360kb).
Even today, the legacy PC I built just to run old DOS games is set to fire up Central Point's, sorry, M$'s, AntiVirus TSR from autoexec.bat before running anything else.
The DOS box is unconnected - hence it requires to execute some .exe .com from a floppy. I seriously doubt he'd get some game on floppies to play.
Technically you can even boot from a write protected floppy disk each time if you are afraid of command.com being infected.
>>If I remember correctly, you cannot boot DOS (or Windows) from a write-protected disk<<
You don't. That was how it was done (booting from write protected floppy). DOS doesn't write anywhere unless you have some fancy autoexec.bat... or a virus.
There were urban myths that some viruses can infect even write protected floppies but if the hardware was fine it was not possible.
"There were urban myths that some viruses can infect even write protected floppies but if the hardware was fine it was not possible."
That would be the case with some of the old-school industrial washing machine size drives where you had a physical switch that actually broke the write/erase head circuit(s). Unfortunately write protect is implemented via software more often than I'd like these days*...
* = Once is too often.
If I remember correctly, you cannot boot DOS (or Windows) from a write-protected disk, as the OS needs to write to the boot medium as part of the boot process.
You can boot from a write--protected disk.
You couldn't *install* Windows unless disk 1 was write-enabled, as that's how it made sure you only installed each copy once. Unless you copied disk 1 first and used that one, of course...
Vic.
Oh god, not MSAV !!! That thing could only detect 200 viruses and would not detect a PC infected with Stoner if it booted from the infected drive. Do yourself a favour and try and find one of the later sharewares of Thunderbyte Antivirus... Before everyone moved of to Win95, I believe TBAV's database had between 30 000 and 60 000 signatures...
If he were working alone, then yeah, he might want some software to assist him in keeping track of the biographies of his characters etc, for the sake of continuity. But he isn't, he employs an assistant - a 'super fan' - to help with that sort of thing.
It is almost a cliché that fans of an imagined world are more likely to spot plot inconsistencies than its actual author, so it seems a sensible division of labour.
There is every chance that uses squid juice on dead tree to write notes, too.
Word Perfect and a Superfan Helper still need Authoring tools to timely finish anything...
IMHO= taking 5 years to complete the latest book in a series seems slow...
His Helper could have done the actual Authoring work with current hardware / software...RS.
Q= did WP have any add-on Authoring tools ?? I only saw it used once - for legal briefs...
Comment= Everyone except 1 legal secretary said they used WP and looking at their work showed it to be MS Word / or / did WP make seamless MS Word files ??
If his setup works for him and he's fully aware of newer alternatives (I'm sure he's no dunce), then good for him for not joining the upgrade rat race and making his creativity his first priority... though I've never seen Game of Thrones and have heard that it's just soft medieval porn... but as I said, I've not seen it so can't comment.
@stanimir
"you're saying it like it's a bad thing"
I'd also say 'like it's a bad thing' if it was like Changing Rooms or Gardener's Question Time since I'm not into those either. It's not like I was making an objective statement to cover the whole of humanity. If that's your bag for boat-floating fun, go for it.
Apart from not really needing formatting when writing a novel (apart from chapter headings and occasional blank lines and, if you write like Jonathan Stroud or Susanna Clarke, footnotes), Word takes up a lot of screen estate for menus and similar stuff, so you see relatively less of your text when writing.
A raw text editor (VI, Emacs, gedit, ...) shows more text (and often more legibly) than Word, it loads faster, it scrolls faster and the text files are much smaller, so you can keep every previous version around even on a tiny machine. And raw text files can easily be imported into whatever software the publisher uses for the final typesetting.
Torben,
of course if you were to customise the menus, switch off unnecessary crud [status bars, horiz scroll bar etc] then there is more screen estate available, fyi I have two rows of icons in mswd/excel/ppt and that's it. Has served me fine for very long time.
Ah, anyone else remember windows 286?
J.
Have you ever used Wordstar? A full text interface and menus, the version I had has a single menu bar at the bottom and a line at the top, maybe 1 line more than vi, but the menu system was more user friendly as the menu bar poped up a few lines when needed, otherwise you had a beautifully uncluttered screen. the only advantage of using Works over Wordstar was that Works for DOS supported a mouse...
He has something that works for him, so he keeps using it. Nothing wrong with that.
Given that GRRM's published writing career goes back to the early 1970s, he presumably did originally use typewriters. I'm curious about when exactly he switched to a word processor. Did he use Wordstar on CP/M before on DOS?
He makes an interesting point though. If you listen to all the crap about the whole "PC is dying" brigade no one uses them any more. The thing is, like with Martin everyone still uses them, they are just happy using the old one the know good and well and have no intention of spending money on something new if they don't have to. We have machines running all kinds of stuff from DOS, 2k, XP, Vista, 7, and various Linux flavours. But it's the job which they do which matters, not what they run.
In the DOS days I had a friend who produced and sold a very specific type of database. At his request I also added a copy of Wordstar (v3 if I remember correctly) to the single floppy disk that was the entire install to act as an editor. The customers loved his product, but eventually the world went Windows and he felt forced to produce a Windows DB.
Cue revolt from customers - none wanted to upgrade, both the DB and Wordstar did exactly what they wanted - tiny footprint, no extraneous garbage, etc. He kept updating the DOS version until really quite recently, but kept the old version of Wordstar, everybody was familiar with it and didn't see any reason to change.
This might not have been the best suite available at the time but I found it affordable and easy to get on with and it did what I wanted it to do. Perhaps he would like copies of the dozen or so 5.25" disk set and manuals? I think I was won over by the colours, all sixteen of them!, having been brought up on either golf-ball printer terminals or those new-fangled monochrome 'green' screens.
Oh I had a more newfangled screen than you did. There was a little switch on the back in text mode where you could change the text colour from white, to green to orange - and you could then load up some DOS games like LHX and play in absolutely glorious MCGA at 320x200 pixels and 256 colors!
A hardcopy would be tricky to restore in the event of a loss of data. As for floppies, they're becoming a dying breed. One possible solution could be a Compact Flash interface, since the pinout of CF actually mimics IDE. Doesn't have to be too big, just large enough to allow a backup to the CF "hard drive", then it can be stashed and swapped for a second CF. Someone mentioned CD-R, and there is a suite of CD-Recording tools. Combined with a CD-RW drive, this is another possible backup avenue, though I think there can be longevity issues with both drive and media.
EDT was excellent for sitting a complete computer novice down in front of a DEC compatible terminal with the numeric keypad labelled up with the individual functions (either with one of the latex overlays, or with sticky labels), and get them to enter some text into the computer. I've not come across anything that was picked up quicker.
The only thing that the students with whom I worked had problems with was the fact that you could not move into the 'blank' parts of the screen without adding some spaces at the end of a line. The concept of the 'end of the line' was difficult for them to comprehend. But everything else, including cut and paste, was picked up very quickly.
If you think using a VT100 was difficult, it was luxury compared to using a VT52! Remember the Gold (and Blue - although not used in EDT IIRC) key.
This was when people used to come to higher education having never seen a computer before.
xedit running on an IBM s/370 with VM/CMS..
XEDIT's OK, but it's no ISPF.
Tried the PC version recently and it made me realise how limited it was.
Yeah, but not as limited as the original AS/400 PDM's Source Entry Utility. Of the IBM big-iron editor family, that has to be the feeblest, I think. At least among the ones I've used.
The IBM big-iron editors do have some handy features, like "folding" (hiding sections of the source). Useful when you're working on terminals with drastically-limited screen real estate.
For my VAX-based courses (assembly language and Fortran, if memory serves) at university I used EDT/TPU over a 1200bps dialup connection. I was very glad to have its replay feature at hand more than once when my call was dropped in the middle of an editing session. Not my favorite editor, but not bad at all.
(Does TPU count when we're reminiscing about EDT? If not, please ignore this post.)
I dug my old P5 out of the storeroom. I had installed DOS6.2, WP5.1 and SPF-PC ( to give the "mainframe experience") & I have a few old DCF documents, and PL1 code saved to show my year 11's how we wrote code and documentation in the "good old days" (and to demo cli vs gui) - I kept a M series keyboard & an old CRT monitor as well . No mouse :-)
I must have great muscle memory because I knocked up a formatted document in WP pretty quickly and never reached for the (non existant) mouse once. To be honest after playing with WP for 10 minutes I was seriously tempted to keep the old box out for creating the "guts" of my my classroom materials, using the W7 and mac mini for browsing , finishing & printing only.
I liked it. But it didn't run well in NTVDM on NT4.0
So I updated a clone in Modula-2 (on DOS, written maybe 1991) to run native in Win32 in a console in 1996. I added ability to use a mouse and double click on a word, and have split screen or single screen and list of open files. If a file of same name existed it opened it, or if not offered to create it. Each file normally a chapter.
I used 3rd party spelling checker on Files.
But by 2002 was using Windows Word for all editing with all the stupid options turned off. I guess no-one showed him the Preferences / Options / Tools menus. I'd wonder what options his Web Browser on separate PC uses. To day I might use Libre Office to write a book.
Perhaps Word Processors should have "Profiles". (Novel, Text to upload to Blog, Flier etc).
I think it shows a great lack of curiosity as he can achieve exactly what he wants on Linux, OS X or any Windows version.
And at that time in the land of CTSS did Saltzer create RUNOFF,
And RUNOFF came also to the land of Multics, and the people there saw it was good;
And RUNOFF begat ROFF and GML,
And GML begat SGML,
And SGML begat HTML and XML,
And the descendants of XML were a multitude upon the land,
So that from every corner of the earth arose the cries and lamentations of the people,
And those cries were "Is this really necessary?" and "What's the advantage of a baroque, barely-readable structured language over, say, a nice normalized rational database schema, for this application?",
And so there arose diverse challengers who contested with XML,
And their names were YAML and MARKDOWN and sundry others,
But their victories were limited and their followers were few.
MS DOS 1.17 and Wordstar 2 was what I started on. those were the days. Everything run and stored on a single sided 180k 5.25 diskette (no folders, not supported under that version of DOS), There was a spellcheck for Wordstar, but you had to run it from it's second diskette...
Ah the days when your operating system came with a 400 page manual (including the BASIC reference) and your word processor had 2x 400 page binders with all the options documented. Those where the days!
I cant say I have written anything more interesting because I had a newer word processor.
But then having watched a bot of 'Game of Thrones' I can't say that wordstar has helped much either.
violence sex and politics.
A friend leant me the series and I have to say I have given up. Apart from the dwarf being actually a very good actor indeed - is he RSC? , the rest is total bollox.
Now if only they could do a number on 'the stainless steel rat';...with esperanto subtitles..
"WordStar and DOS come from a time in which PCs were brutal and digital technology was clunky and unreliable, but Macintoshes were in limited use"
I can recall running DR DOS on a diskless workstation over Novell Netware that ran a word processer, an email client and a browser, all perfectly usable and without the dangers of "Internet" malware.
Which doesn't answer the big question plaguing his audience: Why are the GoT books getting thicker but the contents getting suckier?
Here is the best précis of Dance with Dragons ever written. Spoilers of course, but you'll thank the writer in the end.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/AJ1DWEA83P0YD/ref=cm_pdp_rev_title_1?ie=UTF8&sort_by=MostRecentReview#RQMHSVDEC80QE
Shame I didn't see this before I befouled my Kindle with the book.
"Why are the GoT books getting thicker but the contents getting suckier?"
Because the publishers can charge more money. Generally I've noticed in these kind of huge tomes, if you skip every second chapter, the story doesn't suffer much. GoT strikes me as similar to LotR as written by a lesser hand. In such books there's about one hundred pages of good story, the rest is just filler.The mark of a good author is how good he makes the filler ...
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He's not the only author do do this. Will Self switched to writing the first drafts of his fiction on a manual typewriter about a decade ago. By doing it this way, he says that he manages to avoid the impulse to check his email, buy something he doesn't need or goggle at images of the unattainable. I assume that the last one is a euphemism for surfing for porn.
I can understand where he is coming from, he just wants to write and not have the interruptions from software that thinks it knows better than you.
I actually liked WordStar, a completely uncomplicated program, it was a favourite amongst programmers as you could turn everything off completely which allowed you to write code quickly and simply.
Game of Thrones books Authored w/ Word Star ?? Shure, why not...lightly used computers last forever...
Joke Alert= no one ever used it more than once...8086 n Sony 5in floppies only lived for a couple years...most folks either came from ATT UNIX / Emacs, Apple / Macintosh, Commodore, or dedicated word processors... a whole bunch of equipment specific word processor programs were on 5in floppies for pretty much the cost of the media...all got replaced by MS Word / works at the first possible chance...(at least in our shop, DOS-5 Works, bought at Kroger's)...
Lotus 1-2-3 / Ami-Pro was MS Office's only competitor (Star Office stayed in Europe) for many years...
Word Perfect was the only competition to MS Word during those years....(we used Ami-Pro, bought from IBM)...
IMHO= Casio Word Processors with built-in printer n 3in floppy were a better writing machine during those years...(more reliable too)...RS.
Grammar is an important component of good writing
Sigh.
Grammar is an indispensable component of any writing. Without grammar, all you have is a series of words.
Perhaps you mean that matters of usage, such as agreement in number between subject and verb conjugation, are important in good writing, for languages which express such things?
(Even that is rather too broad a statement to be of much use, in practice or theory, but at least it doesn't abuse the term "grammar".)
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