Game of Thrones written on brutal medieval word processor and OS

Re: "Windows is coming"

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. :(

Re: "Windows is coming"

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.

Re: Ohh so thats 2 people i knw of who use DOS

You do know that DOS can be installed to a hard drive, right? DOS 6.22/Windows 3.11 work quite well on a machine with a 266-Mhz Pentium-2, 64 MB of RAM and 2x 10 GB hard disks.

Re: Almost, but not quite, entirely unlike DOS and Wordstar

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.

Re: You wouldn't give him a hard time if he was using a typewriter

"I suspect vim would also work as well."

When I was using VI, I prayed every day for Wordstar. Joe didn't exist at the time, and I didn't know about Fenix, until I started selling it, the following year.

Re: I'm guessing his novels/scripts have never been hacked and leaked

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.

Re: I'm guessing his novels/scripts have never been hacked and leaked

@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).

Re: I'm guessing his novels/scripts have never been hacked and leaked

But there is such a thing as "style over content".

Re: I'm guessing his novels/scripts have never been hacked and leaked

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.

Re: protestant and catholic (dos and mac)

"dealers in physical markets (he got that one wrong)"

Computer fairs.

One hears tales of these sinister places.

Re: Not worried about viruses?

"Technically you can even boot from a write protected floppy disk"

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.