Technology

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

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.

I feel this.

Back in the 90s, there was a fantastic paint program for Mac called ColorIt! (The exclamation point is part of the name, though this is the last time I will respect that because it's obnoxious; lookin' at you, Yahoo!*)

It was a commercial product, but ColorIt 2.3 was eventually released as freeware after newer major versions were released for sale. 2.3 was everything I needed, and while I did try ColorIt 4.0, it didn't click with me the way 2.3 did. At the time I felt like they bowed to the pressure of Adobe's success and instead of playing to their unique strengths, they made ColorIt's UI a bit too much like Photoshop. So I stuck with version 2.3.

By the time Mac OS X came around, ColorIt was no longer in active development. But OS X had the "Classic" environment, something akin to an OS 9 VM tightly integrated into OS X. Classic apps didn't look or feel like native OS X apps, and running Classic came with a heavy RAM burden. But I did it anyway, because ColorIt 2.3 was da bomb.

I continued using ColorIt 2.3 up until Apple killed support for Classic in 10.6 Snow Leopard.

At that point, the intrepid developers came out of hiding and created a Carbon port of ColorIt 4.5 that could run natively on OS X. It was Carbon-only, which meant that it it didn't run natively on Intel Macs, but it did run thanks to Apple's Rosetta compatibility layer — at least until Apple axed that as well.

If I ever get into pixel art again, I'll probably run ColorIt 2.3 again in an OS 9 VM with Sheepshaver or whatever works best nowadays.

*That exclamation point is strictly to emphasize my disdain for Yahoo.

I love the sentiment around this, and to be honest, i haven’t looked at software in this light even though i feel similarly about books and movies. Sometimes its good to just stop and let things be complete instead of endlessly tacking on more.

One of the things I like best about the Joe text editor is its native WordStar-like interface. You can even use it strictly like WordStar with a fairly simple change.