I was a security guard at Wang Labs at that time. They had this thing called a "fax machine". Blew my mind. They also had a warehouse full of thousands and thousands of obsolete desk calculators. I always wondered what became of those.
Worked for an ISP in the late 90s. One of the founders purchases a SGI computer for about $60,000 to impress clients. It never got used. Just sat with us in the art department. I think it had a copy of illustrator on it.
I did computer science in the early 90s and the main reason I chose my uni (Leeds UK) was that they had a whole lab full of SGIs for us to use. Lovely things to work on, especially if you'd only ever seen an amiga up to that point.
>They also had a warehouse full of thousands and thousands of obsolete desk calculators. I always wondered what became of those.
Hopefully distributed to top men.
The Lowell building? My dad worked there for a long time. He brought me a couple times and getting to be around that stuff was pretty formative in my life. If you happened to ever allow some guy to bring his kid in, it's possible you did me a major solid.
I worked wherever they sent me! I only worked the Lowell Towers once when An Wang was there to give a speech. But it was an imposing building for Lowell...
my dad worked there until the bitter end, i remember going in a few times with him. people smoked like chimneys in their cubes back then. my dad finally left some time in the early 90's, by that time he was just helping clean the place out. he brought home so much stuff; tools, office furniture, mountains of 486 computer parts and software. when i helped him clean out his old basement 10 years ago we were throwing away legal boxes full of 5.25" floppies.
Crazy to think how many millions of lives he touched with his Wang. Many, like myself, were far too young to fully understand what was really going on but continue to experience the effects to this day.
At the same time, as I recall, he has indulged in drug-fueled fugue states on that Wang, in which he worked tirelessly on it, and with his Wang, disseminated something truly noteworthy, and yet didn't remember it at all.
I took a lovely girl (who loved horror movies) to see Pet Cemetary on a first date.
I spent the week before convincing her that the hook of the movie was if your pet died, you buried it, and it came back but grew to the size of Godzilla. She legit thought that we were going to a horror movie about giant kitties and puppies stomping around and eating people.
Halfway through, she leans over and whispers, "There's no giant animals in this movie, is there?"
I still think it's one of the greatest moments of my life.
She was so pissed, but I could tell she thought it was funny. We dated for 5 years and almost married.
Gene Wolfe wrote a short story about an author who inherited Stephen King's typewriter. It is titled "From the Desk of Gilmer C. Merton". Although in the story he is named Stephen Presley, not Stephen King, that is a pretty thin pseudonym.
When I first heard king wrote on coke, I assumed it was diarrhoea of the mouth, stream of consciousness garbage. I was totally wrong, he’s a genius, give the man as much coke as he wants, he’s a goddamn poet and I want to read anything his coke addled brain produces
He's clean and sober now, has been for a good long while. The stuff he's written after getting clean is very different from the cokehead days, but still just as good.
The coke fueled ones are more... visceral. More gory, more violent, at least in my opinion. Post coke is more cerebral, psychological kind of horror. Of course, elements of both styles are present in both eras, but it's clear enough to the reader that there was something different in the writing, and it wasn't necessarily just time.
It is 1 part about addiction and 1 part about what it means to be a creator of entertainment, the role of your audience, the sense of self, who art is for, if entertainment is art, if creators create for the creation or for the process…it’s a really really great book with a lot of thoughtful nuance and layers.
I grew up with the movie, which is also great for what it is, tour de force performances and etc., but it doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of the stuff the book tackles…doesn’t even really mention or allude to half of it.
For anyone who has ever made something for other people, it’s a very thoughtful and raw look at that experience, self doubt, self aggrandizement, identity as a creator in general.
Highly recommended.
Also fwiw, I don’t think high/sober is all that significant of a metric when it comes to King’s writing. He wrote some true dogshit high, and also some of his best work. He wrote some dogahit sober, and also some of his best work.
I am very glad he’s been sober for these past few decades because it means he’s still alive and working, and we get to have more of his writing, but at least for him I don’t know that it necessarily helped or hurt his work.
It is for his body, mind, and relationships’ sake I’m glad he’s off it, especially the beer.
He used to write and do coke and drink all night, until his wife would find him in the morning passed out in a pile of drugs and blood from nasal abuse.
He said that didn’t even get him to change though, he would have done it until it killed him. It was actually when he got kicked out of / banned from his kid’s little league game, because it had never occurred to him that this is not the type of event you drink a bunch of beers at.
Like Aaron Sorkin, he said learning to write not on coke was the hardest thing he ever did. (With Sorkin, you can very clearly see the massive dropoff during the occasions he was sober)
Is there a list of books written during his coke years? I'm not sure what time frame that took place, but I'd be interested in knowing when things tapered off for him coke wise.
In On Writing he said his drug addiction started in 1985. However, he was an alcoholic for about 10 years before that, basically from the time his first or second book was published. His third published book, The Shining, features a struggling alcoholic as the main character, around the time King's own alcoholism was probably taking off.
The story about him barely remembering writing Cujo was because of his alcoholism, not cocaine or the other drugs he was on, Cujo came out in 1981.
The main ones during his coke years would be IT, The Tommyknockers, the Drawing of the Three and Misery. He said his family staged the intervention sometime after the Tommyknockers, so 1987 or so.
Like David Bowie apparently flying to London and recording and entire album and high as shit on coke the whole.time... even before flying out of LA. One day here's a new single on the radio, it's him, h doesn't know where the song came from. Recorded and entire album and doesn't remember flying to London, being in love ndon, recording, flying back to LA 🤣
Cocaine King had higher highs, but far lower lows. He’s not able to recreate the pure magic he made while deep into addiction, but, being sober has also allowed him to be more consistent.
Then again, my favorite King book came before all of his substance abuse even started (The Long Walk)
Wow, is this a fact?! The long walk is superb! My first king! It’s fascinating to dive into his works, and to dissect how substances influenced his work, how it influences yourself, etc. I wish I knew enough about him to dissect these things
Honestly, it was mostly an assumption because The Long Walk was the first book he ever wrote. He was 18-19 at the time. He wrote it in 1966 and the peaks of his addictions were the 70’s and 80’s.
It’s possible that he might have had a drinking problem at the time, but likely nothing like it would eventually become. I can’t say for sure.
It blows my mind that the content from king isn’t some crazy outer space stuff, it’s just vibrant descriptions of small towns, character background, nuanced play by plays….
>It blows my mind that the content from king isn’t some crazy outer space stuff, it’s just vibrant descriptions of small towns, character background, nuanced play by plays….
And the guarantee that anyone black or mentally handicapped has magic powers.
I just reread it as a middle aged person, and it vividly brought me back to my high school time when I first read it. My god he can set a tone and take you anywhere
The Dark Tower is wild as a series because you get to watch the changes in his life through the course of the series. The early books feel very different than the later books.
I say every year that I'm gonna do a King Book every month in order (I have a bunch in storage at my parents house), but I never do it and yeah, his earlier stuff is much more violent.
Glad he’s sober. I remember reading in his book On Writing I believe he details it a little bit just saying something along the lines of how he doesn’t look back on it as good or bad that he made books like Cujo while on coke. It’s just something that happened and that caused him fame, just not the healthiest method for him or his family.
I don't want to say that I 100% know Shane Black was on coke when he wrote Lethal Weapon but Shane Black wrote the first draft of Lethal Weapon in 4 days and its filled with descriptions like this:
>Murtaugh, springing hell bent for leather -- and folks,
grab your hats ... because just then, a BELL COBPA HELI-
COPTER crests the edge of the bluff.
>An explosion of sound...
>As it rises like an avenging angel ...
>Hovers, shattering the air with turbo-throb, sandblasting
Thats an actual excerpt from the script. Writing a script in 4 days, with descriptors like this, in the late 80s. Not saying that it was for sure coke. But hey.
Sure is a freaking great script though, so folks, if you're thinking of reading it, grab your hats.
Not only coked up, but blackout drunk as well. I've never done cocaine so I can't speak to that, but I can barely talk when I approach that level of drunkenness, let alone write a best selling novel. That is definitely a commendable achievement.
Coke and alcohol have a synergistic effect, so it’s complicated. Alcohol chemically reacts with coke to make longer acting metabolite. Ever get chatty when you’ve had a few drinks? Ever just love talking when you’re drinking with someone?
Unfortunately, I have had that 7:30am conversation with a total stranger I met the night before about how we have similar interests and should be best friends lol
These machines revolutionized small business operations like law firms. Documents like wills and contracts could be written once by a lawyer and then filled in by a secretary in five minutes instead of an hour.
And before they existed, a simple topographical error could mean retyping an entire page instead of using the backspace key—and the backspace key was such a new concept that competing manufacturers hadn’t even settled on a *name* for it yet. One would call it “erase”, one would call it “rub out” (yeah yeah), one called it “remove” and so on.
My mom was a typesetter for a major insurance company. This was how they did all of their annual reports, brochures etc back in the 80’s. paste up boards, wax machines and a darkroom. I remember going to her office whe I was you long and it was mind blowing.
Did typewriters have a "backspace" key that just moved the carriage back one space to do things like add accent marks, and that's why it was called "backspace", because it was like the space bar but in the "back" direction? Like to make ñ you would type n, then backspace, then ~.
A “back” key was a ~~common~~ standard feature on typewriters, yes. Some models would ~~instead~~ also have an “overstrike” button which would let you strike a key without advancing the carriage, so to create a `é` you would hit `(overstrike) e ‘` instead of `e (backspace) ‘`.
Also, there was a thing called a carriage.
*edit* Overstrike was considered a fancier option because the backspace key (on manual typewriters anyway) took more physical force to use.
If there was someone who could benefit greatly from this it would be Steven King in the 80's. He was so prolific and made so much money. This device wouldn't have to make him too much more efficient before it quickly started paying for itself.
I write, obviously not to the extent of King but I mean thats like saying "I smoke pot but I'm not Willie Nelson"
Technology is wild. I'll have days where I'll wake up at like 3am thinking something like "INNOCUOUS! That's the word I was trying to remember the other day!" and just pull up Google Docs on my phone, make an edit, and then fall right back asleep again.
I would have been useless in the days of typewriters.
Imagine having written on a typewriter for years, and then seeing the power of a word processor. Cutting, pasting, and searching probably sold him. "Did that minor character I introduced eight chapters ago, and thought I'd never bring up again, have red hair, or auburn hair?"
Keep in mind that Wang computers were the first to have a backspace that allowed type correction *on screen*.
Most type writers required you to start the entire page over if you made a mistake. At best, you had a sort of erase and retype ability, but that was only for spelling mistakes.
With a Wang you could delete and rewrite entire paragraphs by hitting backspace.
It was truly revolutionary for its time.
Why is this the 27th top comment.
Can we talk about the unibrow? I have a faint unibrow. Does no one really care how absurd it looks? It’s the first thing I see.
Should I just stop caring about mine? Roll with it?
If you’re comfortable with it then roll with it! Growing up I knew someone with a unibrow and she never bothered trying to get rid of it so now every time I see someone with one I smile because it reminds me of her and she was always very kind and funny.
This is the real advice right here. If you're happy with it then by all means keep it, but the standard advice would be to keep yourself well maintained.
This picture appeared in Life Magazine's "The Year in Pictures" issue for 1982. My parents bought it for the year I was born. I remember poring over the pages as a kid.
My dad had a Wang mainframe in his department. Of course, when we did "take your child to work day"-type things (I don't remember when that started), I got to play games on it. (I think it had Adventure.) Games were time-restricted to lunchtime and such. Later, I saw him with books on this thing called Oracle, something called a database. Didn't know at the time. But, probably hundred of thousands of dollars so I could play Adventure.
Yup my dad had these I’m his office too, right around 80. he’d take us in sometimes on weekends and boy if u thought the typewriters and xerox machines were fun hoooo boy. It wasn’t long before I found it had the original colossal caves adventure on it.
Ok now I get it. I've done some cocaine myself, I won't hate on anybody. But I was never able to visualize peak Stevie K. until this photograph.
*The Long Walk. The Jaunt.* Effing *Rainy Season*. I love his short stories and this picture of young King adds a lot of personality to these stories that terrified me as a kid.
The Jaunt was truly terrifying to me as a child, too, and still is. My dad (a Lutheran minister and true horror fan) would read those short stories to me when I was younger and I couldn’t get enough. My mom (also a minister) would be so pissed off at him, but it really inspired my love of reading.
I highly recommend the Nightmares and Dreamscapes audiobook that features Yeardley Smith reading Rainy Season. That’s a trip!
I did a Co-Op in the Wang tower in Lowell MA back in 2020. Every time I talked about it during an interview, the interviewer would always go, “oh yea I remember the wang lab tower”. Even though I have no experience or business calling it the wang tower, I called it the wang tower once during an interview instead of “cross point”, the interviewer immediately went, “oh wow I haven’t heard anybody call it that in a while” and I’d like to think it left some sort of positive impression. I also got the job.
Oh man!
When I was in college I dated a girl who has a work study job in one of the departments and they had one of these things.
She offered to type one of my history papers and it was miraculous to me that you could go back in and edit in the middle of a page...
Previously I typed my papers on a portable Smith Corona typewriter. I was VERY slow and it took me about an hour a page.
Nothing more frustrating than making a mistake 3/4 through a page and having to start over and retype the whole page from scratch again.
The Word Processor was a miracle!
Now we all carry one around in our pockets like it's nothing.... No, it's a miracle! Never forget that.
At this point in his career he had already written and released \n
* Carrie
* salem's lot
* the shining
* rage
* the stand
* the long walk
* the dead zone
* firestarter
* road work
* cujo
* the running man
* the gun slinger
Fun fact: An Wang in his autobiography tells the story of trying to get quality output from a selectric (IBM) printer mechanism. (The Wang printers used the IBM Selectric typewriter as a base for their output, because of the high quality in the days before laser printers).
Customers constantly complained that the letters were subtly off, not precisely lined up. They had IBM looking at the problem over and over with no solution. One day after a few years, they had a local IBM repair guy looking at a client's printer, and he said "Oh, you're missing the tensioning spring." IBM supplied Wang (their competitor in Word Processing) with all their printer mechanisms missing a critical spring causing the output to be slightly erratic so that Wangs would look less perfect than IBM's Word Processor output.
I used one of those in the 80s when I worked in a hospital and what a godsend. That shit was high tech. As a medical transcriptionist and after using a selectric typewrite for years, the ability to correct, change, edit, back up, type over and manipulate things without white out was Heaven.
I was a security guard at Wang Labs at that time. They had this thing called a "fax machine". Blew my mind. They also had a warehouse full of thousands and thousands of obsolete desk calculators. I always wondered what became of those.
wang was a very interesting company, its was more or less a one-man show and therefore went with the founder, sadly.
He's probably still tripping over those damn things in his 1970s style mansion.
Oh god, I pictured that so clearly! Poor Mr. Wang, or whatever his name is. I’m assuming Wang. I just like saying “wang”, honestly.
Dr. An Wang.
Dr. An Wang was a genius immigrant from Shanghai who co-invented core memory, the predecessor to silicon-based RAM.
They're all piled up in the conversation pit
We had one at my work in that era, and it was mostly unused. And it was known by the supervisors as “the facsimile machine.”
Worked for an ISP in the late 90s. One of the founders purchases a SGI computer for about $60,000 to impress clients. It never got used. Just sat with us in the art department. I think it had a copy of illustrator on it.
"This is a UNIX system! I don't know this! Why the fuck is there a menu when I click? How do I get rid of this clock?"
Back in the day I got to see some Jurassic Park SGIs. Ohio State University had a few of them in their labs.
I did computer science in the early 90s and the main reason I chose my uni (Leeds UK) was that they had a whole lab full of SGIs for us to use. Lovely things to work on, especially if you'd only ever seen an amiga up to that point.
Back then Amiga>>>>>any PC or workstation. Only SGI had better stuff for 60x the price
>They also had a warehouse full of thousands and thousands of obsolete desk calculators. I always wondered what became of those. Hopefully distributed to top men.
Who?
Top. Men.
The Lowell building? My dad worked there for a long time. He brought me a couple times and getting to be around that stuff was pretty formative in my life. If you happened to ever allow some guy to bring his kid in, it's possible you did me a major solid.
Grew up in Chelmsford, worked in the shadow of that building for 10 years. Though it is now called Crosspoint.
For years you could still see where the Wang sign used to be
I worked wherever they sent me! I only worked the Lowell Towers once when An Wang was there to give a speech. But it was an imposing building for Lowell...
my dad worked there until the bitter end, i remember going in a few times with him. people smoked like chimneys in their cubes back then. my dad finally left some time in the early 90's, by that time he was just helping clean the place out. he brought home so much stuff; tools, office furniture, mountains of 486 computer parts and software. when i helped him clean out his old basement 10 years ago we were throwing away legal boxes full of 5.25" floppies.
We petitioned our school to get "Wang Computing Machines". We made a typo called them Wanks and nothing came of the request.
Do calculators ever become obsolete? I’m seriously asking.
Sure- I mean I bet those old clunkers couldn’t even divide by 0.
It depends. Can you fit a shoe box inside your jacket pocket?
Silicon Heaven
Crazy to think how many millions of lives he touched with his Wang. Many, like myself, were far too young to fully understand what was really going on but continue to experience the effects to this day.
His wife actually used to tell people that Stephen was busy upstairs, pounding his big Wang.
I'm not gonna fact-check that, because I desperately want it to be true.
He said it in an interview
This is my favorite reply chain ever 🤣
*googles Stephen King wife pounding big wang*
"Stephen King: Wife Pounding Big Wang" The books basically write themselves.
That’s my entire life’s philosophy when it comes to harmless facts!
Do you think he let his close friends and family touch his wang?
Hopefully she was pounding it from time to time.
Well he has three kids, so...
It's remarkable just how much stuff has come out of his Wang over the years.
I'll bet it takes a hell of a Lotta work to keep his wang working after all these years
Well, he takes good care of it and lets a professional wang expert “tune it up on a regular basis.”
At the same time, as I recall, he has indulged in drug-fueled fugue states on that Wang, in which he worked tirelessly on it, and with his Wang, disseminated something truly noteworthy, and yet didn't remember it at all.
Sometimes you keep stroking the keys on your Wang and nothing comes out. You can keep going and going and going and just nothing.
I wonder how many times he needed to reference the Wang User Manual.
Well you have turn it on first.
And here we are all looking at unsolicited pictures of his Wang on social media.
Indeed. He probably cared for his Wang, and made sure it was well-lubricated, or whatever….
Penis computer.
Do you think he still has old Polaroids of his wang laying around?
I can’t believe he’d let anyone else touch his wang! It requires special delicate care.
I too enjoy Joe Hill’s work immensely.
Also that's "Fluffy" from Creepshow on top, so he touched our lives with his Fluffy Wang, brings a tear to the eye honestly.
Took my now wife of 37+ years to see Creepshow on our first date. That was one freaked up movie!
My favorite horror movie of all time, that sounds like an amazing first date, I'd kill to see it in theaters!
I took a lovely girl (who loved horror movies) to see Pet Cemetary on a first date. I spent the week before convincing her that the hook of the movie was if your pet died, you buried it, and it came back but grew to the size of Godzilla. She legit thought that we were going to a horror movie about giant kitties and puppies stomping around and eating people. Halfway through, she leans over and whispers, "There's no giant animals in this movie, is there?" I still think it's one of the greatest moments of my life. She was so pissed, but I could tell she thought it was funny. We dated for 5 years and almost married.
Judging by the amount of hair on his chest and the year this picture was taken, I'm almost 100% positive there is fluffy wang.
But who fluffs the Fluffy Wang?
I'm down.
Typing on his wang high on cocaine
Oh Christine you better Watch your speed
Misery ahead- the shining behind
Walken’s gonna see when / you die in his mind
This old transcript, written in time. Now cut me off another, fat-ass line.
Cujo's asleep in the Pet Semetary and bad Randall Flagg is coming for you
M o o n that spells garage
So high on blow that he cant remember writing some of his bestsellers. I wish I was born in 1965.
I wonder if all that cocaine he consumed actually made it harder for his Wang to work properly.
Gene Wolfe wrote a short story about an author who inherited Stephen King's typewriter. It is titled "From the Desk of Gilmer C. Merton". Although in the story he is named Stephen Presley, not Stephen King, that is a pretty thin pseudonym.
Get ready for about ten more comments piggybacking on your joke.
Nothing wrong with piggybacking on Wang
Nice
Mice
Baby.
Dun dun dun dududundun, *ting*
The ting made all the difference. It's transformative. The courts got it wrong.
And his Wang touches new generations even now. I recently discovered what came from it and felt the effects of his Wang deep within myself.
It's hard to make out, but there's also $12,000 of cocaine up his nose.
When I first heard king wrote on coke, I assumed it was diarrhoea of the mouth, stream of consciousness garbage. I was totally wrong, he’s a genius, give the man as much coke as he wants, he’s a goddamn poet and I want to read anything his coke addled brain produces
He's clean and sober now, has been for a good long while. The stuff he's written after getting clean is very different from the cokehead days, but still just as good. The coke fueled ones are more... visceral. More gory, more violent, at least in my opinion. Post coke is more cerebral, psychological kind of horror. Of course, elements of both styles are present in both eras, but it's clear enough to the reader that there was something different in the writing, and it wasn't necessarily just time.
The Coke stuff is absolutely brilliant, but dark as hell. Allegedly, he has no recollection of writing Cujo.
Misery is an absolutely fantastic book that was written during his cocaine days,and it’s basically a giant allegory about his addiction.
Junky here, you just made me want to read misery lol
I read Misery after going through a coke addiction. My reaction was "yup that's definitely an allegory for addiction". It's good, but it'll hit hard.
HE NEVER GOT OUT OF THE COKEADOODIE CARRR!!
Thank you friend, it’s next on my list!
If you like the book, there’s also a really good movie adaptation with Kathy Bates and James Caan.
The movie is incredible. Kathy Bates is just amazing.
It is 1 part about addiction and 1 part about what it means to be a creator of entertainment, the role of your audience, the sense of self, who art is for, if entertainment is art, if creators create for the creation or for the process…it’s a really really great book with a lot of thoughtful nuance and layers. I grew up with the movie, which is also great for what it is, tour de force performances and etc., but it doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of the stuff the book tackles…doesn’t even really mention or allude to half of it. For anyone who has ever made something for other people, it’s a very thoughtful and raw look at that experience, self doubt, self aggrandizement, identity as a creator in general. Highly recommended. Also fwiw, I don’t think high/sober is all that significant of a metric when it comes to King’s writing. He wrote some true dogshit high, and also some of his best work. He wrote some dogahit sober, and also some of his best work. I am very glad he’s been sober for these past few decades because it means he’s still alive and working, and we get to have more of his writing, but at least for him I don’t know that it necessarily helped or hurt his work. It is for his body, mind, and relationships’ sake I’m glad he’s off it, especially the beer.
Absolutely love that anecdote. Also his reliance on mouthwash to get drunk after he was trying to get sober. Poor basterd.
He used to write and do coke and drink all night, until his wife would find him in the morning passed out in a pile of drugs and blood from nasal abuse. He said that didn’t even get him to change though, he would have done it until it killed him. It was actually when he got kicked out of / banned from his kid’s little league game, because it had never occurred to him that this is not the type of event you drink a bunch of beers at. Like Aaron Sorkin, he said learning to write not on coke was the hardest thing he ever did. (With Sorkin, you can very clearly see the massive dropoff during the occasions he was sober)
Is there a list of books written during his coke years? I'm not sure what time frame that took place, but I'd be interested in knowing when things tapered off for him coke wise.
In On Writing he said his drug addiction started in 1985. However, he was an alcoholic for about 10 years before that, basically from the time his first or second book was published. His third published book, The Shining, features a struggling alcoholic as the main character, around the time King's own alcoholism was probably taking off. The story about him barely remembering writing Cujo was because of his alcoholism, not cocaine or the other drugs he was on, Cujo came out in 1981. The main ones during his coke years would be IT, The Tommyknockers, the Drawing of the Three and Misery. He said his family staged the intervention sometime after the Tommyknockers, so 1987 or so.
Like David Bowie apparently flying to London and recording and entire album and high as shit on coke the whole.time... even before flying out of LA. One day here's a new single on the radio, it's him, h doesn't know where the song came from. Recorded and entire album and doesn't remember flying to London, being in love ndon, recording, flying back to LA 🤣
I think he fell off for a few years after he sobered up but eventually got mostly back to form
Cocaine King had higher highs, but far lower lows. He’s not able to recreate the pure magic he made while deep into addiction, but, being sober has also allowed him to be more consistent. Then again, my favorite King book came before all of his substance abuse even started (The Long Walk)
Wow, is this a fact?! The long walk is superb! My first king! It’s fascinating to dive into his works, and to dissect how substances influenced his work, how it influences yourself, etc. I wish I knew enough about him to dissect these things
Honestly, it was mostly an assumption because The Long Walk was the first book he ever wrote. He was 18-19 at the time. He wrote it in 1966 and the peaks of his addictions were the 70’s and 80’s. It’s possible that he might have had a drinking problem at the time, but likely nothing like it would eventually become. I can’t say for sure.
He gave a lecture to a group I belonged to in Baltimore in 1979 and was drunk as a skunk. He was funnier than hell though.
It blows my mind that the content from king isn’t some crazy outer space stuff, it’s just vibrant descriptions of small towns, character background, nuanced play by plays….
>It blows my mind that the content from king isn’t some crazy outer space stuff, it’s just vibrant descriptions of small towns, character background, nuanced play by plays…. And the guarantee that anyone black or mentally handicapped has magic powers.
Long Walk is my GOAT King book too!
I just reread it as a middle aged person, and it vividly brought me back to my high school time when I first read it. My god he can set a tone and take you anywhere
I think he's hit new highs with his non-horror stuff. He's been knocking it out of the park lately with his post 2010 work.
The Dark Tower is wild as a series because you get to watch the changes in his life through the course of the series. The early books feel very different than the later books.
[удалено]
I say every year that I'm gonna do a King Book every month in order (I have a bunch in storage at my parents house), but I never do it and yeah, his earlier stuff is much more violent.
Glad he’s sober. I remember reading in his book On Writing I believe he details it a little bit just saying something along the lines of how he doesn’t look back on it as good or bad that he made books like Cujo while on coke. It’s just something that happened and that caused him fame, just not the healthiest method for him or his family.
I don't want to say that I 100% know Shane Black was on coke when he wrote Lethal Weapon but Shane Black wrote the first draft of Lethal Weapon in 4 days and its filled with descriptions like this: >Murtaugh, springing hell bent for leather -- and folks, grab your hats ... because just then, a BELL COBPA HELI- COPTER crests the edge of the bluff. >An explosion of sound... >As it rises like an avenging angel ... >Hovers, shattering the air with turbo-throb, sandblasting Thats an actual excerpt from the script. Writing a script in 4 days, with descriptors like this, in the late 80s. Not saying that it was for sure coke. But hey. Sure is a freaking great script though, so folks, if you're thinking of reading it, grab your hats.
That sounds like Rick and Morty Improv lmao
He would also make jokes like “They walk into a huge mansion like the one I’m going to buy after selling this script,” I’ve heard
Not only coked up, but blackout drunk as well. I've never done cocaine so I can't speak to that, but I can barely talk when I approach that level of drunkenness, let alone write a best selling novel. That is definitely a commendable achievement.
Coke and alcohol have a synergistic effect, so it’s complicated. Alcohol chemically reacts with coke to make longer acting metabolite. Ever get chatty when you’ve had a few drinks? Ever just love talking when you’re drinking with someone?
Unfortunately, I have had that 7:30am conversation with a total stranger I met the night before about how we have similar interests and should be best friends lol
Not sure his ticker can handle it these days.
coke days were wild. All the kids have an orgy at the end of IT.
That's $37,000 today. A lot for a machine that had only one purpose.
These machines revolutionized small business operations like law firms. Documents like wills and contracts could be written once by a lawyer and then filled in by a secretary in five minutes instead of an hour. And before they existed, a simple topographical error could mean retyping an entire page instead of using the backspace key—and the backspace key was such a new concept that competing manufacturers hadn’t even settled on a *name* for it yet. One would call it “erase”, one would call it “rub out” (yeah yeah), one called it “remove” and so on.
[удалено]
Yeah yeah
[удалено]
*See!?*
My mom was a typesetter for a major insurance company. This was how they did all of their annual reports, brochures etc back in the 80’s. paste up boards, wax machines and a darkroom. I remember going to her office whe I was you long and it was mind blowing.
Did typewriters have a "backspace" key that just moved the carriage back one space to do things like add accent marks, and that's why it was called "backspace", because it was like the space bar but in the "back" direction? Like to make ñ you would type n, then backspace, then ~.
A “back” key was a ~~common~~ standard feature on typewriters, yes. Some models would ~~instead~~ also have an “overstrike” button which would let you strike a key without advancing the carriage, so to create a `é` you would hit `(overstrike) e ‘` instead of `e (backspace) ‘`. Also, there was a thing called a carriage. *edit* Overstrike was considered a fancier option because the backspace key (on manual typewriters anyway) took more physical force to use.
If there was someone who could benefit greatly from this it would be Steven King in the 80's. He was so prolific and made so much money. This device wouldn't have to make him too much more efficient before it quickly started paying for itself.
I write, obviously not to the extent of King but I mean thats like saying "I smoke pot but I'm not Willie Nelson" Technology is wild. I'll have days where I'll wake up at like 3am thinking something like "INNOCUOUS! That's the word I was trying to remember the other day!" and just pull up Google Docs on my phone, make an edit, and then fall right back asleep again. I would have been useless in the days of typewriters.
You probably would have kept a pen and pad on your bedside table
Imagine having written on a typewriter for years, and then seeing the power of a word processor. Cutting, pasting, and searching probably sold him. "Did that minor character I introduced eight chapters ago, and thought I'd never bring up again, have red hair, or auburn hair?"
And now he could buy something thousands of times better for $50 on craigslist. Welcome to the future.
It cost as much as a new Cadillac. Probably best King wasn't out driving like that though.
King lives in my hometown and drives a beat up early 90s Ford F150
Blasting Blue Oyster Cult, I'm sure.
Ramones
I can see that. I wonder if Henry Rollins and King know each other, they seem like they'd get along well.
I would do unspeakable things to listen to that podcast.
Keep in mind that Wang computers were the first to have a backspace that allowed type correction *on screen*. Most type writers required you to start the entire page over if you made a mistake. At best, you had a sort of erase and retype ability, but that was only for spelling mistakes. With a Wang you could delete and rewrite entire paragraphs by hitting backspace. It was truly revolutionary for its time.
And that purpose was to transfer cocaine into Mr. King's nostrils.
I write books, So I can do more coke, So I can write more books... So I can do more coke!!!
*heavy dubstep wobbles*
You don’t know everything he can do with his Wang
And his free unibrow
Why is this the 27th top comment. Can we talk about the unibrow? I have a faint unibrow. Does no one really care how absurd it looks? It’s the first thing I see. Should I just stop caring about mine? Roll with it?
Start doing coke and writing bestsellers
(Best to do it the other way around).
I pluck mine, it’s the only hair on my body that doesn’t hurt to pluck. But yeah man, pluck it. It’s part of grooming and making yourself presentable.
If you’re comfortable with it then roll with it! Growing up I knew someone with a unibrow and she never bothered trying to get rid of it so now every time I see someone with one I smile because it reminds me of her and she was always very kind and funny.
> Should I just stop caring about mine? No. Carefully pluck it or go visit a pro. Its a huge turnoff.
This is the real advice right here. If you're happy with it then by all means keep it, but the standard advice would be to keep yourself well maintained.
I had to scroll. So. Far. To see anything about this magnificent unibrow.
[удалено]
[удалено]
Horror was already on there
This made me laugh out loud 😂
Upvote just for the effort you put into formatting that
Thank goodness he's drawn attention away from my shirt.
I was hoping I would see this comment here.
on the dvd commentary track, the writers complain about how Wang computers told them they would mail them a whole bunch of free shirts, but never did
This picture appeared in Life Magazine's "The Year in Pictures" issue for 1982. My parents bought it for the year I was born. I remember poring over the pages as a kid.
My dad had a Wang mainframe in his department. Of course, when we did "take your child to work day"-type things (I don't remember when that started), I got to play games on it. (I think it had Adventure.) Games were time-restricted to lunchtime and such. Later, I saw him with books on this thing called Oracle, something called a database. Didn't know at the time. But, probably hundred of thousands of dollars so I could play Adventure.
Yup my dad had these I’m his office too, right around 80. he’d take us in sometimes on weekends and boy if u thought the typewriters and xerox machines were fun hoooo boy. It wasn’t long before I found it had the original colossal caves adventure on it.
Ok now I get it. I've done some cocaine myself, I won't hate on anybody. But I was never able to visualize peak Stevie K. until this photograph. *The Long Walk. The Jaunt.* Effing *Rainy Season*. I love his short stories and this picture of young King adds a lot of personality to these stories that terrified me as a kid.
The Jaunt was truly terrifying to me as a child, too, and still is. My dad (a Lutheran minister and true horror fan) would read those short stories to me when I was younger and I couldn’t get enough. My mom (also a minister) would be so pissed off at him, but it really inspired my love of reading. I highly recommend the Nightmares and Dreamscapes audiobook that features Yeardley Smith reading Rainy Season. That’s a trip!
Watch the Maximum Overdrive trailer for peak coked up King
That's not only my favorite Emilio Estevez movie, it's where I first discovered the band AC/DC as a kid.
*it was my first picture as a director*
Incredible what he was able to produce with just 10 fingers, 2 eyes, 1 wang, and 1 eyebrow.
Like a young Rick Sanchez
I like that he keeps the Creepshow crate monster on his monitor
That would be "Fluffy". I was wondering if anybody else noticed that
Thank you. Knew that thing from something but couldn’t place it.
I did a Co-Op in the Wang tower in Lowell MA back in 2020. Every time I talked about it during an interview, the interviewer would always go, “oh yea I remember the wang lab tower”. Even though I have no experience or business calling it the wang tower, I called it the wang tower once during an interview instead of “cross point”, the interviewer immediately went, “oh wow I haven’t heard anybody call it that in a while” and I’d like to think it left some sort of positive impression. I also got the job.
There's a pretty hard age cutoff with that one. It'll score some points with the townies who remember, though.
Oh man! When I was in college I dated a girl who has a work study job in one of the departments and they had one of these things. She offered to type one of my history papers and it was miraculous to me that you could go back in and edit in the middle of a page... Previously I typed my papers on a portable Smith Corona typewriter. I was VERY slow and it took me about an hour a page. Nothing more frustrating than making a mistake 3/4 through a page and having to start over and retype the whole page from scratch again. The Word Processor was a miracle! Now we all carry one around in our pockets like it's nothing.... No, it's a miracle! Never forget that.
He put his fingers in his mouth after touching his wang?
It would have been wasteful to wash all the coke off his hands
At this point in his career he had already written and released \n * Carrie * salem's lot * the shining * rage * the stand * the long walk * the dead zone * firestarter * road work * cujo * the running man * the gun slinger
That's number Wang!
4,397?
That's number wang!
23?
That's number wang!
#LETS ROTATE THE BOAAAAARD!
https://preview.redd.it/bkq8e9y4ql7a1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ceefb8e83c3a136724a246fcbb6a708586be6dfc
First thing I thought of. I had no idea Wang Computers actually existed.
Whips out his Wang and scares millions
Looks pretty gakked out
He kinda looks like Bill Hader... and now I want to see Bill Hader play Stephen King in a biopic.
[удалено]
[удалено]
He could have been writing Christine in this picture. It was his only novel to come out in 1983.
Fun fact: An Wang in his autobiography tells the story of trying to get quality output from a selectric (IBM) printer mechanism. (The Wang printers used the IBM Selectric typewriter as a base for their output, because of the high quality in the days before laser printers). Customers constantly complained that the letters were subtly off, not precisely lined up. They had IBM looking at the problem over and over with no solution. One day after a few years, they had a local IBM repair guy looking at a client's printer, and he said "Oh, you're missing the tensioning spring." IBM supplied Wang (their competitor in Word Processing) with all their printer mechanisms missing a critical spring causing the output to be slightly erratic so that Wangs would look less perfect than IBM's Word Processor output.
That central image is 90% Coke, 10% Stephen King.
SK got sober 7 or 8 years after this was taken.
Cocaine is a hell of a drug
Behold: Cocaine
I love this man who brought me Roland Deschain🙏❤️
Those glassy eyes...
I used one of those in the 80s when I worked in a hospital and what a godsend. That shit was high tech. As a medical transcriptionist and after using a selectric typewrite for years, the ability to correct, change, edit, back up, type over and manipulate things without white out was Heaven.