(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
[–] randallsquared 4 days ago
[–] egypturnash 3 days ago
- 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
[–] __del__ 4 days ago
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
N = 1, but I wrote a science fiction novel in Wordstar on a DOS computer circa 1983.
[–] nradov 4 days ago
[–] staticman2 4 days ago
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. "
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...