alt Hacker NewsIt 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.
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