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points by saidnooneever 4 days ago | 0 comments

this guy speaks a lot with people who know where things are headed technology wise and somehow is so good at understanding potentials and implications. u know he wrote neuromancer on a typewriter because appearently he does/did not like computers (atleast back then).

[–] duskwuff 4 days ago

Neuromancer was written between 1981 and 1984. The personal computers that existed at that time were poorly suited to writing; using one to write a novel would have been a deliberate and rather unusual choice.

(Consider, for example, that the first chapter of Neuromancer alone would have exceeded the stock memory capacity of many personal computers at the time, at ~46 kB.)

[–] qohen 4 days ago

The personal computers that existed at that time were poorly suited to writing

Were they? [0]

A legitimate early use of personal computers was to replace the typewriter, as the modest requirements of basic word processing lent themselves well to the equally modest capabilities of these early machines.

By the early 1980s, the word processing market was dominated by two main rivals: WordPerfect and WordStar. Microsoft wasn’t even in the running yet, as the 1983 MS-DOS release of what would become Microsoft Word (then called Multi-Tool Word) came and went with hardly a splash.

This article [1] on use of word processors by well-known authors in the early 80's (and before) is worth reading too.

Oh, and as far as memory goes, remember these devices had floppy drives that could store at least 360Kb and, in March 1983, the IBM PC XT came out with a 10MB hard drive.

[0] From https://retrotechreads.substack.com/p/the-rise-fall-and-surp...

[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/133011/literature-became-wor...

[–] randallsquared 4 days ago

Pournelle was using a microcomputer to write, then, as was Gerrold. Word processors of the time didn't try to keep a whole chapter in memory, and Pournelle famously started using a home computer to write novels in 1977.

[–] egypturnash 3 days ago

"Pournelle claimed to be the first author to have written a published book contribution using a word processor on a personal computer, in 1977.[62][63]"

- wikipedia

On a computer that cost him $12k in 1977 dollars (~$66k in 2026 dollars) for "14 lines of 64 characters on a monochrome monitor the size of a small black and white TV", according to the article that footnote 62 refers to (https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/9/16279582/jerry-pournelle-s...). Computers were hilariously expensive back then. Pournelle had a lot of money to burn and got real good at getting free stuff due to his Byte column.

An Apple ][ with 4k of RAM was $1200 in 1977 (~$7k now) (plus monitor, drive, and printer, also maybe a bit more than double the computer's price for a 48k machine). Not as expensive as whatever Pournelle bought but still a pretty major purchase.

A new typewriter in 1977, meanwhile, would run you about $50-170. About $300-950 in 2026 bucks. Less for a used one from the local pawn shop or typewriter repair shop or whatevs.

William Gibson, meanwhile, was a broke-ass teacher with a collection of punk records when he wrote Neuromancer, around 1982-1983. It's really no surprise he used a typewriter.

[–] duskwuff 3 days ago

Thank you. Yes - that's where I was going with this. It was certainly possible to use computers for long-form writing in the early 1980s, but it wasn't a particularly economical or practical way of going about it. Some people did, but they were in it more for the novelty than practicality.

[–] __del__ 4 days ago

yes, it bears repeating that text editors didn't keep entire documents resident in memory, they maybe buffered a page ahead and behind.

when it appeared as a feature, spell checking was impressive for the technical feat of compressing word lists with tens of thousands of entries into representations suitable for tiny memories.

[–] gcanyon 4 days ago

> The personal computers that existed at that time were poorly suited to writing; using one to write a novel would have been a deliberate and rather unusual choice.

N = 1, but I wrote a science fiction novel in Wordstar on a DOS computer circa 1983.

[–] nradov 4 days ago

One of the plot points in Neuromancer concerns the protagonist trying to sell 3MB of stolen RAM. That seems ludicrous today, especially for a story set in the future. But in 1981 that was an enormous amount.

[–] staticman2 4 days ago

I will note William Gibson definetly wasn't in any traditional sense a tech enthusiast.

In Novemember 1994 he said:

"I don't have an e-mail address, I don't even have a modem. As much as I admire the Internet I suffer literally agoraphobia, which in it's original sense means a fear of the marketplace. I do not want to receive three hundred e-mail messages per week from strangers wanting to communicate with me. If only because I'd be tempted to open them all and look at them. And there goes, you know, half the time that I have to write. I mean, the amount of physical mail and other communications I get these days is already swamping me. "

https://josefsson.net/gibson/gibson4

[–] capncleaver 4 days ago

It’s a trend with stunningly predictive (or causative ymmv) cyberpunk authors https://www.nealstephenson.com/why-i-am-a-bad-correspondent....

[–] walrus01 4 days ago

It wasn't that he didn't like computers at the time, he didn't have money for a proper word processing setup. Something good enough to write a full length novel on in 1981 with a printer and the commercial word processing software would have been the equivalent of $3500-4500 or more in today's money adjusted for inflation.

[–] queenkjuul 4 days ago

I think you're off by roughly half; an IBM PC with printer and monitor was about $5000 in 80s money, probably more like $10k adjusted

[–] walrus01 4 days ago

It depends on what range of the years 1981-1984 we're talking about, but yes, it was very costly. Not that a full IBM PC would necessarily be required to write a novel. People were writing whole books on less expensive CP/M based systems with like two 160KB floppy drives. One to boot and run the word processor software from and one for data file storage.

I have a family member who bought an Osborne Portable for something like $1800 1981 money, an inflation calculator says that would be the equivalent of $6,971.17 today.

[–] roughly 4 days ago

Gibson is a trend spotter. He doesn’t look at technology, he looks at people and culture (he is notably interested in fashion). It’s easier to see what’s happening when you pay attention to who’s doing the thing and what they’re doing, as opposed to what it’s being done to.