”George RR Martin writes on an ancient program called Wordstar 4.0 on a dos computer. He is selling more books than nearly anyone on the planet and his computer can’t even send an email. … So often we think that we need more to be successful.”

Kyle Westaway

@JohnPhilpin Thankfully he was able to use something with which he could copy-paste entire sections of English history.

@JohnPhilpin Oh my goodness! I remember in undergrad one of my professors getting a copy installed on her office computer, and it was up to 6 or 7 at that point.

I also think I saw an old copy of WordStar that we never used when we cleaned out the office a few years ago—along with 4 different copies of WordPerfect 5.1 (we were a WP office). I had always wondered why we had that but later realized my dad started the company during or just after the market pivoted from WordStar to WordPerfect….

I do wonder about the logistics of that for Martin, though…does some poor soul have to retype every word to get it published, or is there something that can import WordStar 4 files?

@smokey If someone has to retype Martin’s ancient word processor manuscripts, then I wonder if someone OCRs Robert Caro’s typewritten manuscripts…

@JohnPhilpin @Smokey My most computer literate friend for many decades (RIP) had used all three of those word processing programs extensively, as well as MS Word eventually. I don't remember why, but it was always Wordstar that he said he had loved the most. In its day, I believe it dominated its market.

@Ron My professor was the same way (I imagine she had written her dissertation in it, so she had used it quite a bit)—she started writing in WordPerfect for Windows (because the college was a WordPerfect school, and it was clear at that point that WordStar was not going to make a comeback), but she never seemed happy about it.

@smokey There's at least one third-party utility out there that can convert WordStar to Microsoft Word (FileMerlin). Word itself actually could import WordStar files up through Office 2003, I think, although you needed to download a free converter pack.

@smokey @JohnPhilpin Somebody is cloning Wordstar to run on Windows, Linux and eventually OSX. Called WordTsar wordtsar.ca

I used WordStar back in the CP/M days and also on DOS. It was a good program for those pre-mouse days. But Word Perfect (DOS) and MS Word (DOS) came along and were much more powerful with things like near automatic creation of footnotes, endnotes, index generation and tables of contents.

But I understand Martin's point, if you just want to get words and paragraphs down without too many layout distractions WordStar will do that. Let the publishers do the layout work.

@smokey I wrote my university dissertation using WorStar, on my Dad’s Amstrad 1512.

@schuth @smokey that’s why ebooks end up with interesting typos

@smokey That's how Steve was too.

@cn That, and the lack of quality control :-P

@chipotle Ah, that must be how they handle Martin’s documents. (I had forgotten that on its climb to 800 lb gorilla, MS Word had developed importers for all of the competition.)

@bradenslen Analogous to how many of us write in text editors and the like these days—and clearly he’s very familiar with WordStar, so why switch at this point if the publisher can handle the files and the DOS machine still runs!

@vanessa Cool! (I had to look up Amstrad, so I learned something, too :-) )

@smokey the copy of The Hobbit I’ve been reading from archive.org has words runtogether in someplaces… 🙃

@cn :-( I never OCRed an entire book, much less one of that length, but my post-OCR process always involved running spellcheck as step 1, which I found catches/fixes a large swath of errors. It’s a shame the people adding those classics to archive.org don’t care enough to do that.