David Gewirtz recently posted a link to an old television interview with Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin. The fantasy author swears by his DOS-based computer running WordStar 4.0, a word processor that was released in 1987. It seems anachronistic, but many of us, not just writers and other creatives, display really obsessive compulsive tendencies when it comes to their tools of choice.
I’ve adapted to the modern age – I write most of what I’m working on in Markdown-compatible text editors these days, and really love Ulysses – an app from The Soulmen which runs on iOS and OS X, and makes it really easy to sync between devices via iCloud. But just for fun, I spent a bit of time this morning getting refamiliarized with my favorite word processor from the “classic” Mac OS days: WriteNow.
Published by T/Maker, WriteNow is a contemporary of Martin’s WordStar 4.0 – it came out in the mid-1980s after the Mac was introduced. Anyway, I got WriteNow working in emulation on my Mac this morning and took it for a spin.
What’s amused me the most is how hard-wired my muscle memory is. It took all of about two minutes to get reacquainted with the keyboard commands to do everything I need to. It tempts me to get started on that ten part space opera book series I’ve been planning. I mean, if a three decade old word processor is good enough for the Game of Thrones guy…
