In His Own Words

The first novel I pretended to write on a computer was The Andromeda Strain in 1969. It contained some diagrams that claimed to be computer-generated. Actually, I made the diagrams on an IBM Selectric typewriter with a computer-font ball, rolling the paper back and forth in the carriage until I got the image I wanted.

The first novel I actually wrote on a computer was Congo in 1979. I wrote it on a dedicated word processor, which was exotic technology in those days. My publishers were suspicious when they received my flawlessly clean typescript—and flawlessly clean revisions. They thought I was up to something. I was.

Next I bought an Apple II+, because I wanted to learn programming. I had started a company to make software for film pre-production, and I wanted to understand something of what programmers faced, so I popped in a language card, taught myself BASIC, and wrote some programs.

There followed an unhappy time with IBM PCs—I found the metal boxes forbidding, and difficult to work on. That ended when I bought one of those cute 512K Macs to fool around with at home. Two days later, the IBM was removed from my office, and the Mac installed there. I have written on Macs ever since.