7 ms·

If you're a novelist your career doesn't usually start rolling until you're in your mid-thirties. (You need life experience before you can depict characters fol

• EwanG 15y ago
  Let's face it. A TRS-80 Model 100 in many ways is probably still the ideal portable writing machine. Only displays a couple lines at a time so you can't get too distracted with formatting and such. Rugged, full keyboard, 20+ hours of battery life, and reasonably easy to read even in full daylight. While I have migrated to an iPad 2 for many things, I sometimes wonder if that really represented an improvement...
  • astrodust 15y ago
    I'd like to proof-read things more than a line at a time, though.
• dy 15y ago
  Would love to have you do a usesthis as well - the more obscure stuff is especially fascinating as it usually carries a much better story than just "I'm using the newest Macbook Pro and I got 8GB of RAM."
  • cstross 15y ago
    Well, I am a gadgetoholic-in-recovery. Let's skip lightly past the colo server running Debian that I keep the blog on. I'm mostly a Mac shop. On my desk right now is an older 23" Apple Cinema display, being driven by an October 2010 13" Macbook Air (4Gb/250Gb SSD, OS: 10.7.2). Next to me is an iPad 2/64Gb and a 3 mifi, with a ZaggMate cover/keyboard. And there's an iPhone 4 that ain't going to be upgraded until it's at least 24 months old (next summer). Pretty dull, huh? (There are also hordes of eccentric items around here, such as the Viliv N5 palmtop -- currently running Win7 as I don't have the energy to battle a GMA500 chipset into cooperating with Linux right now -- but let's not get into lesser-used territory.) Core software: - Firefox 7.blah (with noscript, adblock pro, ghostery, beef taco, instaright, https-everywhere, and tab mix plus) - Thunderbird (mostly using gmail as an IMAP/SMTP/SSL server) - BBedit (what can I say -- it's prettier to stare at than MacVim, and seems to support MultiMarkDown better) - Apple Pages (I loath MS Office 2010's ribbon with a cold and fiery passion because it eats vertical screen real estate; Pages is "good enough" for layout and final markup) - Scrivener (because when I write myself into a corner and need to refactor the deep structure of a book, Scrivener makes life a lot easier) - NeoOffice/OpenOffice/LibreOffice (because sometimes I need something that can handle MS Office documents better than Pages) - Calibre (ebook management software) - NetNewsWire (this may change soon) - SplashID (because we all need unique passwords for each website, right?) - MacPorts - iTerm (and Go2Shell) ... I think that about covers it. I really don't game much, if at all (it interferes with work to have attractive nuisances on my computers). Dream rig: (This is going to strike you as deeply sad) Start with a build-to-order Macbook Air 11", 4Gb RAM/128Gb SSD. Add the 1.8GHz i7 CPU bump. Don't bother with the 256Gb SSD from Apple because we are going to replace the stock SSD with a 3G OWC Mercury Aura Pro Express sized in 480Gb. Finally add a 27" Apple Thunderbolt Display for when it's sitting on my desk. Underpowered? Sure. But it's tremendously portable, and I'm on the road for 8-12 weeks of the year. Two wires to connect, and I have a decent desktop system. Unconnect, and I have a nice 1Kg notebook. The reason I don't have this dream rig right now is that I have the last generation, and I'm not quite enough of a sucker to upgrade every time Apple crack the whip, thanks. Maybe next year.
    • dy 15y ago
      Awesome cstross - thanks for taking time to answer the question - I like the idea behind the MacBook Air with the 480 GB upgrade and may have to look into that myself. I just got an iPhone 4S and it surprises me how close it feels to being eligible to be my only computing device - in a few years I can imagine sitting down next to my computer and just having the Apple Wireless Thunderbolt display connect to it and have my entire computer ready to go (I'd go through the trouble of plugging in a cable if necessary :) This line really caught my eye: "(because when I write myself into a corner and need to refactor the deep structure of a book, Scrivener makes life a lot easier)" I've heard of Scrivener being used by writers for this purpose, but do you think it would work well for programmers? I'm struggling right now like I've written myself into a corner and notes/diagrams aren't really helping as much as I'd like.
• keithpeter 15y ago
  "obscure British word processor, originally for CP/M and MS-DOS, now supported as a hobby project by one of the former developers -- the company is long since bust." Charlie, I'm racking my brains here. Ami Pro? Pipedream (no, that was Acorn Archimedes, and don't we wish Thatcher had supported that particular lame duck). And how on earth does the revered author get the words out to publishers? OCR and an Olivetti might be easier...
  • StrawberryFrog 15y ago
    I'd guess WordStar. Or failing that, WordPerfect. WordPerfect was more commonly seen, but WordStar fits the description of "Runs on CP/M and is not supported" better. Edit: See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar#Abandonment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar#Abandonment
    • cstross 15y ago
      Nope: Protext. http://www.tigerteam.co.uk/protext/ http://www.tigerteam.co.uk/protext/
      • keithpeter 15y ago
        NC100 - got it
    • 2mur 15y ago
      George R.R. Martin writes on WordStar. http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/1220865-talking-about-the-dance http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/1220865-talking-a...
• swdunlop 15y ago
  (I know one award-winning SF novelist who uses an obscure British word processor, originally for CP/M and MS-DOS) This is not so exotic; how many of us still adhere to vi in an xterm when we are in "time to stop fooling around and work" mode. ;)
  • Semiapies 15y ago
    vi and emacs are products that are still upgraded and distributed; obscure word processors by shuttered companies are a different thing.