The 'Dune' Screenplay Was Written In MS-DOS (vice.com) 140
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Oscar winning Dune screenwriter Eric Roth banged out the screenplay using the MS-DOS program Movie Master. Roth writes everything using the 30-year-old software. "I work on an old computer program that's not in existence anymore," Roth said in an interview in 2014. "It's half superstition and half fear of change." Roth wrote the screenplay for Dune in 2018 and explained he was still using Movie Master on a Barstool Sports podcast in 2020. That means Dune was written in an MS-DOS program.
In the video, he pulled up a DOS window in Windows XP and booted up Movie Master 3.09 on an ancient beige mechanical keyboard. "So now I'm in DOS. Nobody can get on the internet and get this," Roth said. "I have to give them a hard copy. They have to scan it and then put it in their computers and then I have to work through their computer because you can't even email mine or anything. You can't get to it except where it is. It has 40 pages and it runs out of memory." [...] Roth also said the 40 page limit helps him structure his screenplays."I like it because it makes acts," he said. "I realize if I hadn't said it in 40 pages I'm starting to get in trouble." Another writer to use MS-DOS is George RR Martin, notes Motherboard. He apparently used MS-DOS program WordStar "to slowly write ever single Game of Thrones book."
In the video, he pulled up a DOS window in Windows XP and booted up Movie Master 3.09 on an ancient beige mechanical keyboard. "So now I'm in DOS. Nobody can get on the internet and get this," Roth said. "I have to give them a hard copy. They have to scan it and then put it in their computers and then I have to work through their computer because you can't even email mine or anything. You can't get to it except where it is. It has 40 pages and it runs out of memory." [...] Roth also said the 40 page limit helps him structure his screenplays."I like it because it makes acts," he said. "I realize if I hadn't said it in 40 pages I'm starting to get in trouble." Another writer to use MS-DOS is George RR Martin, notes Motherboard. He apparently used MS-DOS program WordStar "to slowly write ever single Game of Thrones book."
GoT ending (Score:5, Funny)
Well now I know why George RR Martin canâ(TM)t finish his books. He ran out of disk space.
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Well now I know why George RR Martin can't finish his books. He ran out of disk space.
Funny, but speaking of that, are there plans for someone to finish the series? Obviously, Martin won't be doing it.
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Re:GoT ending (Score:4, Informative)
He just needs to install Stacker.
Should have used a C64 (Score:5, Funny)
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Not necessarily.
https://www.ebay.ca/itm/144252... [www.ebay.ca]
The issue is more about the typical breadbox keyboard being massively uncomfortable to type on for any length of time. The 64C is better, the SX-64 better yet, but a 128D has something close to a modern keyboard.
But memory is not an issue.
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Disk swapping (Score:5, Informative)
With a page holding 3000 characters, roughly, that means that 256k would only hold about 150-200 pages of text.
You're assuming that the whole document is held at the same time in memory (which is probably how your current favourite word processor works - That is: if you're still using a real offline one and not some web app à la Google Docs, MS Office 365, etc.)
That's not how old computers did work.
It is much closer to how modern video editors work (and also how modern web app word processor stream the document from the web):
RAM is mostly used to keep the current page and a few neighbouring one. (and at that point the page boundaries themselfes arent necessarily the final).
If you start moving around in the document, some sections will get loaded from the disk drive, while you recent change will get saved in the temporary folder.
(Well that is in the ideal world if there were no bugs. There's still a small chance that the thing will corrupt the temporary file and that you'll need to restart from the last saved document. Or corrupt the save document on the disk-drive if that's how the word processor worked, and you would need to restart from your last floppy backup).
Think of it a bit like Google Docs progressively streaming the content of your documents as you scroll around.
That's one of the reasons why a lot of the older document format are so convoluted and almost have their own internal filesystem and allocation table: they were designed (or more precisely cobbled together) to be random read-wrote accessible, due to the limitation of memory.
The final page setup, i.e.: running through the whole convoluted file content and flattening it, is done at printing time. e.g. putting the final location of all the automatic page breaks (because as you edited paragraphs in the editor, you could have shifted lines around. But the software didn't recompute the whole page layout of the whole document's pages for performance reasons. Also, your drive would probably melt under the load if done constantly :-D )
Sometimes this layout isn't even done on the computer (the oldest word-processors I have been using did merely stream the text to the printer, only sending occasionally some commands for user-forced page-breaks, but let the laser printer otherwise setup most of the pages)
More RAM simply increases the amount of "non-current" pages that you can cache.
Or could allow running multiple application in the GUI if supported (such as, running some small application for general purpose use like a calculator)
Or, if resources permits, starting a second software, like a spell checker (back then those weren't plugins that add coloured squiggly line, but a separate stand-alone piece of software that is able to open a few common formats and output corrected copy).
Depending on format, that could be more, or less.
Yup, you're onto something when you're thinking format. But it's even weirder. It's not just that the pages are efficiently stored in RAM.
It's that a few tables of contents and other general information are the only things kept in memory and text content itself is slowly retrieved from disk.
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typewriter with macros (Score:5, Insightful)
Do we really need to live on a software update conveyor belt when it comes to primitive word processing? Film and theater scripts don't even need proportional fonts.
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Do we really need to live on a software update conveyor belt when it comes to primitive word processing? Film and theater scripts don't even need proportional fonts.
Correct, unless you want (or the studio forces you) to email them the script. Then, you will have to find a way to make your wordstar 4.1 or MovieMaster 3.09 to run in a modern machine with security patches and support, lest someone "can get on the inernet and get ot it".
But be warned, if you want to use old hardware with your old SW, you run the risk of the ever increasing posibility of HW failure, and all the intricacies of finding and configuring replacement HW. All the epochs have their problems, whethe
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He prints out a hard copy and the studio has to physically scan the paper.
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At forty pages, it's something the average secretary would knock over in 20 minutes. With the kind of money the industry throws around, I'm sure it's a non-issue.
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That is to say, this was before "pixel" was a word (or faxes)
The fax is significantly older than Tezuka. We were transmitting photographs good enough for newsprint by radio and telephone before he was born! It was perfectly ordinary by the time he had anything interesting to fax.
I have no idea why someone would tell you such a strange story.
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Re:typewriter with macros (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not talking about some experimental technology here. I'm saying that before 1928, when Tezuka was born, we were regularly sending faxes that were of sufficient quality for newsprint publication. The German police were even using faxes to send fingerprints in the 1920s.
"Fax-by-wire" was a well-established commercial technology by the time Tezuka was born. That's not a "concept", but a real, practical, and perfectly ordinary technology. It would not have been unusual for someone to send a picture "by wire" to a newspaper at any point in Tezuka's life.
I don't know where the AC heard that story, but there is every reason to be skeptical.
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I don't make a specific study of such things, but I believe the first versions were working in the 1870s. Certainly, the 1910 6-volume textbook on "printing technology and process" which I picked up in a car-boot sale in the early 1980s considered such things important enough to mention in an apprentice's training.
"the" ? "the"? At least one person in this conversation has not had the joys o
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You are making it too hard.
Print file to a text file, then email that.
Clue: Old software supports text files (Score:4, Informative)
... unless you want (or the studio forces you) to email them the script ...
Decrepit old software like WordStar or MovieMaster are perfectly capable of generating a text file that can be emailed.
Clue: that's why you emulated on PowerPC (Score:4, Insightful)
... the removal of 16 bit instructions in AMD-64 64bit processors modes (courtesy of AMD no less) ...
That's why you emulate the x86 software on a PowerPC based Mac, to ensure access to these nstructions.
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... the removal of 16 bit instructions in AMD-64 64bit processors modes (courtesy of AMD no less) ...
That's why you emulate the x86 software on a PowerPC based Mac, to ensure access to these nstructions.
SoftPC, baby!
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Re:typewriter with macros (Score:5, Informative)
Uh, MS-DOS still runs on modern hardware as a bare metal OS. If you want to have fancy things, FreeDOS works much better with modern hardware.
Even the latest CPUs still support 16-bit real mode operation - only when you switch to x64 long mode do you lose access to 16 bit capability.
And if you really want to do it, DOSBox X or ECE runs DOS apps perfectly well.
Anyhow, the 40 page limit isn't really a limit. A movie is generally 3 acts, and a two hour movie is only between 160-200 page screenplay (usually around 180 pages).
So 40 pages is just enough to write through most of an act.
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A movie is generally 3 acts, and a two hour movie is only between 160-200 page screenplay (usually around 180 pages).
So 40 pages is just enough to write through most of an act.
Something doesn't add up...
180 / 3 = 60
40 * 3 = 120
Maybe you're thinking of the popular modified 3 act structure where the second act split into two distinct halves. (Save the cat!) That could work as 40 * 4 = 160, but it's at the lower limit of your 160-200 page range. Using your numbers, the 40 page limit is, at best, barely adequate. Even then, it only works if each section is exactly 40 pages.
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Are you sure about this? A couple of days ago I was working on a PC from last year and I couldn't find a way to enable CSM in its ROM setup. No CSM = no BIOS = no DOS (and no Windows < 7, either).
Perhaps the option wasn't available because of some combination of other settings, or perhaps it was hidden by the manufacturer of the motherboard, but still...
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Coreboot and SeaBIOS (Score:2)
Are you sure about this? A couple of days ago I was working on a PC from last year and I couldn't find a way to enable CSM in its ROM setup. No CSM = no BIOS = no DOS (and no Windows < 7, either).
The poster above was probably pointing out that there is no hardware limitation to running FreeDOS(*) on the latest hardware on the market. (CPUs still run 16bit 8088-compatible instructions)
As you point out, it's merely a software limitation, as FreeDOS expects only BIOS interrupt calls, whereas the firmware on its side expects exclusively an EFI executable (no CSM).
Still there are routes around that:
- Coreboot opensource firmware supports SeaBIOS as a payload to provide a BIOS-like interface and b
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I don't know about all that, but I do know that you can still buy new (if not modern) hardware today that will run DOS faithfully, not just FreeDOS but also MS-DOS. Most of it is in the form of industrial SBCs, and you can get them with relatively modern processors (not literally modern, but at least something with vector operations, superscalar operation and such) and ROM BIOS. They are provided for legacy purposes like industrial control, where it's a lot cheaper to buy a SBC than to modernize. Even thoug
Re:typewriter with macros (Score:5, Funny)
Today you could just email the whole virtual machine running ms-dos and the MM software and the script itself - preserved as the author left it.
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Today you could just email the whole virtual machine running ms-dos and the MM software and the script itself - preserved as the author left it.
How many 5 1/4 inch floppies would you need to download "the whole virtual machine running ms-dos and the MM software and the script itself"?
Re:typewriter with macros (Score:5, Informative)
Eh, it takes a minute to install DOSBox on any modern OS. There will be zero fiddling required for a word processor, or 99% of software, only on super rare occasions for games. I run DOS apps in Linux, it's not a challenge and hasn't been for decades. Why this guy uses a decrepit WIndows XP PC, you'd have to ask him but probably some combination of ignorance and superstition.
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I hear you there, you can run old software in emulation in multiple ways and it's not hard. My old "retrocomputer" needs way too much TLC to keep running as components fail. (DolchPAC 65 "luggable", so non-standard PC parts that are cheaper to repair than to replace)
In the case of something like MovieMaster, I'd recommend vDos. Wordperfect and others run like a dream for me, and it supports printers. I once set up a chiropractor's office with vDos on Win8 so they could continue dot-matrix printing patient r
An actual answer. (Score:2)
Sure, he could throw out his old box, get a new one (forking over some $), set ip up, copy over everything (that'll be way more than a minute BTW), set up dosbox and with 99% likelihood it'll "just work". Aaaaand the gain from that time and money spent is...?
There is a good reason to spend time and money like this:
Not needing to deal with the time in the middle of a big project.
It's much more comfortable to upgrade the machine in a planned fashion in the downtime between two projects, than needing to address it urgently because the old decrepit machine inevitably went belly up right in the middle of some critical crunch time, and deal with the probable lost data / letast X hours of un-saved work, all this while the "Super Important Dead-line(tm)!" is looming cl
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I remember when Word for Windows came on 6 floppy disks.
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I remember when Windows came on 5 floppy disks (I still have them).
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No.
But do you need to run on an unsupported operating system, on obsolete hardware (the computer can't be even UEFI, right?
So it's PCI/AGP at best, POSSIBLY SATA but I would imagine more likely IDE... good luck getting working parts for that) in a piece of software that's literally never made any more, to write a screenplay without distractions?
Also no.
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You're not wrong, but this guy was already famous - and his script won an award.
That said, he's stultified and trapped in amber if he can't learn new software.
/ says the guy that still prefers 'jstar' over most other editors for Linux
Just a tool (Score:4, Insightful)
As long as he's keeping backups of his work, I see no problem.
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I'm more shocked that he's using Windows XP as the host system, rather than that he's using DOS.
Re:Just a tool (Score:5, Insightful)
What backups?
I can't fathom anyone allowing this level of risk to exist on such a high-value project. If I'm reading this correctly, he has exactly one original digital copy, that one, single file on an emulated MS-DOS file system hosted on an unsupported Win XP file system? That's reckless. Reckless and insane.
Amazing Technology (Score:5, Insightful)
Presumably the original book was written on a typewriter. It might have even been a manual. Anything that will let you edit what you've typed on the screen is a quantum leap forward. Features added from there can make the results look nicer, but they aren't nearly the game changers that the clean backspace key and cut/paste were.
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Presumably the original book was written on a typewriter. It might have even been a manual. Anything that will let you edit what you've typed on the screen is a quantum leap forward.
The question is whether it improves the writing or not. If your second and third drafts involve typing the whole book/script out again I suspect there's quite a lot of pressure to both keep things tight and to make sure changes are integrated into the whole story. Being able to change just this paragraph or swap these two chapters may lead to sloppy work.
It certainly seems that long books - very long books - have become much more common in the years since manual typewriters died out. Same with movies - the
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Some people prefer simpler word processors like that because they are distraction free. You can't just open a browser or look at something else. The app covers the whole screen, you have to save and quit to do anything else.
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I'm not sure those words mean what you think they mean.
if it works, don't fix it (Score:5, Informative)
I became proficient at CP/M WordStar long ago. Worked just fine for basic document editing and you never suffered from the random reformatting that continues to afflict Microsoft Word forty years later.
On the other hand, WordStar 2000 was a gong show and I never touched the thing.
I guess I agree with Buckley about that. I'm about as keen on a new wave of keyboard assignments or ribbon bars as having someone randomly upgrade my alphabet.
Was Rice understood intuitively is that vampires are not the least bit keen on having their traditional alphabets randomly upgraded, many of whom continue to mourn the loss of their old azabercnageuua [wikipedia.org].
Re:if it works, don't fix it (Score:4, Insightful)
Fictional vampire writer Anne Rice was another faithful user of WordStar ...
And here I thought she was a real person all this time. I'm gonna stick with comic books, vampire fiction is way too meta for me.
Re:if it works, don't fix it (Score:4, Funny)
Vampire fiction is the original writing that sucks.
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What's not clear is why Rice didn't consult someone who knew something about computers to help her continue to run Wordstar, which she could have done.
What's also not clear is why she replaced a text editor like Wordstar with a word processor like Word. That's just not that smart, if what you want is a text editor.
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I encouraged my father to move to Word. He's on LibreOffice now. The primary reasons were
- new computers (his original CP/M machine was a Microbee)
- compatibility (there was a program called Alien, which could convert text files, but if I wasn't around he was in trouble)
- again, new computers, connectivity, compatibility
He loved WordStar, and moving was incredibly hard, so I'm proud of him for achieving it. He wrote his first two books there, and the rest have been on more modern programs.
Incidentally, o
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Incidentally, one of the hardest things for him was switching from the mentality of "first you create (name and save) the file, then you start writing in it" to the current "write first, save later"
There's no need to behave that way. You can create new documents from the file manager (from templates) and then open them and start working in them. For example from the context menu in windows explorer.
MS-DOS Celtex (Score:2)
I haven’t found a replacement yet for Celtex circa 2004
Its what I learned on, its integrated functions are not supportable in unix. And there’s no way back to monolithic source code.
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I havenâ(TM)t found a replacement yet for Celtex circa 2004
You mean celtx? It still exists.
Its what I learned on, its integrated functions are not supportable in unix.
wat [snapcraft.io]
I thought was news for nerds? (Score:2)
Only vi!!ian parts (Score:2)
are written in vi ;)
So loved being able to do ALL functions (search/copy/cut/paste/indent/ect) without ever moving fingers off of keyboard - so much faster than any of the "modern" GUI editors.
ESCwq!RETURN
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ESC ends commands, not starts them.
In wq! the ! binds to the q, not the w so if the file can't be written, it will exit anyway. You want w!q or better x! which has been around for at least 4 decades. If you are using reference stuff that uses wq, find newer stuff.
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ESC ends commands, not starts them.
It doesn't start them, but it puts you into a mode where you can start them. It does however end them, as you say.
Re:I thought was news for nerds? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I thought was news for nerds? (Score:5, Interesting)
My father used to take me on Friday nights to the university so I could use the computer, back in 1983. Yes, the computer -- there were a couple of PCs around, but everybody prefered using the mincomputer (a Foonly F2) in the terminal room. I was eight years old.
He taught me how to write in Emacs. What did I write back then? TeX, of course. No, not LaTeX, as Leslie Lamport had not yet published it -- It was just TeX, installed by Donald Knuth in person, on his visit to Mexico in 1977.
Cue to 2021. 38 years later, four published books, several articles, and countless not-published things later... My tools of the day-to-day trade are still TeX (well, LaTeX) and Emacs.
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False sense of security (Score:5, Informative)
So now I'm in DOS. Nobody can get on the internet and get this
That has nothing to do with anything. It's still part of the same filesystem that XP is using. If XP has internet connectivity then the files are as vulnerable as anything else in XP. Now if the computer ONLY had DOS, that's a different story. I think he may have a false sense of security here.
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He doesn't have a Page 41 and he doesn't have a removable drive.
Get this man a USB floppy drive at least, good god.
RS-232 serial / USB adapter (Score:3)
Get this man a USB floppy drive at least, good god.
And a RS-232 serial / USB adapter
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For a start, you'd also have to persuade ("train", even) him to research and install DOS drivers for the (?, or "a" - in which case he;d also have to choose "which") USB driver stack for his computer-of-choice.
The problem that you're trying to solve is along the line of "his computer can't do X", when the actual situation that is being described is a lot closer to him saying "I don't want a computer that
Re: False sense of security (Score:2)
Maybe, but then he could do that with a modern computer. Many motherboards donâ(TM)t have built-in WiFi and in many of the ones that do have it, it can be disabled easily.
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I agree, and that't the main reason I descended into this thread. Running a DOS emulator on an XP machine is as insecure as running any other program on an XP machine.
Of course, not having a network interface (including wireless) in the machine, nor a serial-ish modem would help. Access exploits then fall back to the WiFi modem built into the (PS/2) keyboard cable ... which is getting pretty old school, but
findstr /s truth (Score:2)
Made some money converting formats (Score:5, Interesting)
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Ancient software can run on modern hardware, you k (Score:4, Informative)
I definitely share the sentiment that some software was perfected in the '90s (and early aughts) and that more modern versions are just distracting--my photo editor of choice is Photoshop 7.0, I use InDesign CS2 for posters and flyers, and my most played games are SimCity 2000, EGATrek, Homeworld and Tyrian-- but I gotta say, I don't miss the days of CRT screens, Blue Screens of Death and corrupted diskettes. Luckily, emulators, virtual machines and WINE have made it EASIER to run my favorite software, on any platform (including my phone or a $50 Raspberry Pi) while enjoying modern innovations like automated backups / cross-platform data syncing, environment isolation, IPS/OLED displays and wireless peripherals.
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Even better it opens up software libraries of operating systems most haven't even heard about like BeOS.
Things more capable than MS-DOS prohibited (Score:5, Funny)
The headline is a lie (Score:4, Informative)
Just RTFS. It was written in Windows XP.
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Just RTFS. It was written in Windows XP.
It was written in Movie Master.
A DOS program.
Running under XP.
I Still use a C64 Program to track my finances. (Score:2)
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I remember writing BALANCE.BAS in BASICA (yes, I cut my BASIC teeth on a PC, not on a C64) somewhat over 35 years ago.
Now, are your finances as complicated as they were back then?
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I Still use a C64 Program to track my finances.
I've been using it for about 35 years.
Can it project when you will be able to afford a new computer?
Very impressive! (Score:3)
"I work on an old computer program that's not in existence anymore,"
It's one thing to use a computer program that is no longer developed or supported, but to use a program that doesn't even exist? Now that's impressive!
It is indeed superstition (Score:2)
If the program doesn't exist any more. I suspect he means "sold for excessive amounts".
Come back, Wordstar, all is forgiven (Score:2)
I started on Wordstar, running on CP/M. The machine was built by my business partner. It had a Z80 XPU, a full 64k of RAM, and two 8" floppy drives. It booted up faster than any PC since: clunk, whirr, clunk, command prompt. The earlier version of this machine only had paper tape for storage, and I was told it took about an hour to boot.
Later, we got PCs. I can't remember the spec. I got really fluent at Wordstar commands. Total muscle memory. As well as letters, invoices, and so on, I used it as a poor man
Many of us use software that's even older... (Score:2)
I use vi every day to write stuff. I imagine many of you do too.
Often I use vi to write stuff in LaTeX, producing documents that look more professional than colleagues' documents in Word.
Just 'cause it's old doesn't mean it's bad.
I miss CygnusEd (Score:3)
CygnusEd ("ced") on the Amiga is still my favourite editor of all time, it was simply amazing what one could do with a few lines of AREXX (for instance, sending emails over DNET using a modem connection to our uni dialin server)... very cool, but I guess I should be more than happy with emacs as a replacement (though ced looked way cooler with its smooth scrolling etc :-))
All the best
Uwe
one might think (Score:2)
That with the incredible performance horsepower in a typical computer today, it would be possible to essentially give these users a word "shell" ui that is indistinguishable from a 1990 era system running wordstar.
Minimalist word processors are a thing (Score:3)
A few things happening here. A combination of software and hardware that gels the creative flow, don't mess with it. Okay. How about looking at what systems have provided the best experiences for writers, yes include the 40 page act or memory overflow as a datapoint too, and see if we can learn something? For myself, I absolutely HATE Microsoft Word and yet must use it constantly. What have I LOVED in the sense that it felt great, helped creative writing and limited distractions? Or otherwise helping with writing?
The ones that come to mind are: ;)
1) P.I.E. Writer (Programmer's Interactive Editor) by I think Aldus, for the Apple ][. I STILL miss it after like 4 decades. Though there is emacs I wouldn't use it for word processing... Sorry!
2) A dedicated word processor, it was a Wang I think, for the school newspaper. Had 8 1/2 inch floppy disks and a portrait oriented green screen CRT
3) I found a modern app somewhere but ended up not using it for some reason and now I need to find it again.. It was also green screen on black background. Writer or Darkroom? JDarkroom from Code Alchemists? Writer from ia.net? I'm thinking now it was Writeroom from Hog Bay Software, the same green screen as the Wang and what one reviewer from the NYT calls "the ultimate spartan writing utopia", but I will look at these others too. Writeroom is $10 but there are free ones too.
4) I met a writer a while back who typed all of the books of authors he liked on a mechanical typewriter. Typed the whole things out. Okay.
5) Tools for writers like research and screenplay software? Haven't used it but used to want to buy Scrivener (from Literature & Latte)
Some links:
https://medium.com/@cathalynn/... [medium.com]
https://gigaom.com/2007/06/22/... [gigaom.com]
https://www.reddit.com/r/writi... [reddit.com]
"Ancient Beige Mechanical Keyboard" (Score:2)
DOSBox (Score:2)
Somebody should tell these guys about DOSBox. Then they could update to something more recent than Win XP as the host system. Though as long as they aren't on a network it probably doesn't matter.
Ah, the old song (Score:2)
"Because I can't do it, nobody can do it."
Because nobody could possibly hack your incredibly insecure XP and get unlimited access to your DOS VM that way.
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I was thinking the same thing. Ignorance of computers isn't protecting him.
He may not actually be connected to the internet, and that's a personal choice, but he seems to think it's intrinsically a DOS feature.
News for Nerds (Score:2)
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And that being in a DOS prompt on XP means that you can't get access to those files.
Granted, the computer isn't necessarily online, but why you'd think an XP machine is somehow protection for the files "made in DOS" that are sitting on it, I can't imagine.
NANO forever (Score:2)
I'm Not Surprised (Score:2)
I'm not surprised, as there is the cognitive effort to learn a particular word processor or text editor's idiosyncrasies, and the way the app does specific things. But DOS was solid, unless you booted off a 5.25" inch floppy disk system.
For just text I use FocusWriter, then will put it into Pages or Word to specifically format and make a swanky and fancy document. :)
In college I had the Norton Textra editor for writing and coding, although I did learn to use Turbo Edit for programming, and writing the READM
The Prideful Ignorance is What Gets Me (Score:2)
As if I were to say "See my car with the missing wheel out in the driveway? Can't drive, so it never gets into accidents".
If he wants to use ancient software on an old computer, fine. But to cripple the whole downstream process by sticking with hardcopies? That's some BS right there. He must write the best scripts we've ever seen for studios to put up with that insanity.
I can relate. (Score:2)
He's not an expert, so he probably doesn't know about journaling file systems or limits to address-space, but otherwise I can totally relate. Why change if it works and is wicked fast? I write all my texts in regular editors.
To be fair, someone should show him a decent CLI editor on some *nix machine with automatic backups and a journaling filesystem. ... Errrm, maybe Emacs? ... Ok, forget it. That DOS thing he's using is probably just perfect.
Maybe Vim.
Jokes aside, maybe someone should show him Notepad++,
me no get it (Score:2)
Written In MS-DOS (Score:2)
So names in all caps and no longer than eight characters.