Let me introduce you to WordStar 4.0, a popular word processor from the early 80s. WordStar 4.0 As old as it seems, George R.R. Martin used it to write “A Song of Ice and Fire”. Why would someone use such an old piece of software to write over 5,000 pages? I love how he puts it: It does everything I want a word processing program to do and it doesn't do anything else.
  • fer0n@lemm.eeOP
    22·
    11 months ago

    Quoting the beginning of the article:

    Let me introduce you to WordStar 4.0, a popular word processor from the early 80s. As old as it seems, George R.R. Martin used it to write “A Song of Ice and Fire”.

    Why would someone use such an old piece of software to write over 5,000 pages? I love how he puts it:

    It does everything I want a word processing program to do and it doesn’t do anything else. I don’t want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type up a lowercase letter and it becomes a capital. I don’t want a capital, if I’d wanted a capital, I would have typed the capital. – George R. R. Martin

  • m-p{3}@lemmy.caEnglish
    9·
    11 months ago

    Also one of the beauty of the Unix philosophy.

    I’d rather have a bundle of small, specialized utilities, each with a specific scope that I can then combine into a workflow than a one-size fits all software.

    Software like ffmpeg, curl, awk, etc can accomplish so much when combined together.

    • PenguinTD@lemmy.caEnglish
      7·
      11 months ago

      ffmpeg is actually a bad example in this case, it’s evolved so much and including way more stuff than what it was originally set out to do. Like sure it doesn’t come with UI but commercial/FOSS software all use it one way or another.