You may have heard that Game of Thrones (read: A Song of Ice and Fire) author George R.R. Martin writes on a decades-old computer. Well, it's (still) true: he hones his craft on a DOS-based PC running WordStar 4.0, the same technology he used when he started his fantasy series in 1991. But... why? Thanks to a sit-down with talk show host Conan O'Brien, we know. As he puts it, the ancient hardware does everything he needs in a word processor, and nothing more. Automatic spelling checks in modern software would actually get in the way; you'd get frustrated, too, if you had to watch out every time you wrote "Winterfell" or "Daenerys Targaryen." Martin has a modern PC for everything else, but he makes a good case for using only the technology you need to get a job done. Let's just hope he has backups -- he won't get much help if that old machine eats his Winds of Winter manuscript.

[Image credit: Matt Sayles/Invision/AP]