SciFi Author (and Byte Columnist) Jerry Pournelle Has Died (jerrypournelle.com) 221
Long-time Slashdot reader BinBoy writes: Science fiction author and Byte magazine columnist Jerry Pournelle has died according to a statement by his son Alex posted to Jerry's web site. A well-wishing page has been set up for visitor's to post their thoughts and memories of Mr. Pournelle.
Pournelle's literary career included the 1985 science fiction novel Footfall with Larry Niven, which became a #1 New York Times best-seller -- one of several successful collaborations between the two authors. In a Slashdot interview in 2003, Larry Niven credited Jerry for the prominent role of religion in their 1974 book The Mote in God's Eye.
Wikipedia also remembers how Byte magazine announced Pournelle's legendary debut as a columnist in their June 1980 issue.
"The other day we were sitting around the BYTE offices listening to software and hardware explosions going off around us in the microcomputer world. We wondered, "Who could cover some of the latest developments for us in a funny, frank (and sometimes irascible) style?" The phone rang. It was Jerry Pournelle with an idea for a funny, frank (and sometimes irascible) series of articles to be presented in BYTE on a semi-regular (i.e.: every 2 to 3 months) basis, which would cover the wild microcomputer goings-on at the Pournelle House ("Chaos Manor") in Southern California. We said yes."
Slashdot reader tengu1sd fondly remembers Pournelle as "frequently loud, but well reasoned." He also shares a link to a new appreciation posted on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America site. And Slashdot reader Nova Express also remembers Pournelle's Chaos Manor website "later became one of the first blogs on the Internet."
Pournelle's literary career included the 1985 science fiction novel Footfall with Larry Niven, which became a #1 New York Times best-seller -- one of several successful collaborations between the two authors. In a Slashdot interview in 2003, Larry Niven credited Jerry for the prominent role of religion in their 1974 book The Mote in God's Eye.
Wikipedia also remembers how Byte magazine announced Pournelle's legendary debut as a columnist in their June 1980 issue.
"The other day we were sitting around the BYTE offices listening to software and hardware explosions going off around us in the microcomputer world. We wondered, "Who could cover some of the latest developments for us in a funny, frank (and sometimes irascible) style?" The phone rang. It was Jerry Pournelle with an idea for a funny, frank (and sometimes irascible) series of articles to be presented in BYTE on a semi-regular (i.e.: every 2 to 3 months) basis, which would cover the wild microcomputer goings-on at the Pournelle House ("Chaos Manor") in Southern California. We said yes."
Slashdot reader tengu1sd fondly remembers Pournelle as "frequently loud, but well reasoned." He also shares a link to a new appreciation posted on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America site. And Slashdot reader Nova Express also remembers Pournelle's Chaos Manor website "later became one of the first blogs on the Internet."
Sad (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
I've only read two but they were excellent - and they're among the best movies never made. Imagine the organised chaos of More Prime done in good CGI.
The "wonder" years. (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes the Byte era. Eyes filled with wonder, not so jaded and cynical back then. Computers had possibilities instead of limitations.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Alas.
Re: (Score:3)
Same here! I was a regular subscriber to BYTE, until the magazine went out of print. Like the GP said, the potential was endless. That was before companies started dropping left and right like flies, and our personal information replaced great computers as major sources of revenue. I participated in the magazine's online blog hosted by Jon Udell months after BYTE fired most of its staff, but after the end of Windows NT on the Alpha, my interest faded.
Within BYTE, I'd occasionally read Pournelle's colu
A sad day (Score:4, Informative)
--He was a major contributor to the "great fiction" genre. He will be missed.
Well, I'm not glad he is gone, but I am not sad. (Score:4, Informative)
I used to think he was intelligent and thoughtful capable of cutting through the crap, yet sadly his last "post" exemplifies all that I later found mistaken and flawed in his approach.
Maybe he isn't quite as much of a flaming ideologue as some of the die-hards here, but it still reeks of a bias, a sneering condescending disdain for the liberals that he blames for all the problems of the world.
All supported with a litany of aphorisms to recite until they are ingrained into your very soul.
Sad to lose such a man, but we lost him to his own bitterness many years ago.
Re:Well, I'm not glad he is gone, but I am not sad (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm imagining a beyond-the-grave interview from Heinlein. Pournelle was a pantywaist compared to RAH.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"a sneering condescending disdain for the liberals that he blames for all the problems of the world."
They are not the cause of all the problems in the world, just for being wrong about all the problems of the world - even when compared to the old Greatest Generation Democrats.
Re: Well, I'm not glad he is gone, but I am not sa (Score:2, Insightful)
Thanks for using your mod points as a "I disagree" button, I'll give you a chance to waste them some more.
The fact is, Pournelle succumbed to the worst commandment of all, not criticizing his fellow "conservatives" as declared by his Saint, the Great Reagan.
Against my better judgment, but to give the benefit of the doubt, I've read a few more pages of diaries. What do I see? The standard right-wing catechisms.
For example, the usual song-and-dance over Confederate statues, and esteem for the fabled Lee.
Re: Well, I'm not glad he is gone, but I am not sa (Score:4, Insightful)
The whole "KKK are extremist Democrats" is an absurd statement. That was true 70 years ago before the Dixiecrats basically split from the Democrats. And where did most of the Dixiecrats ultimately end up? In the Republican Party.
Re: Well, I'm not glad he is gone, but I am not sa (Score:4, Funny)
The grave dude. If they're still voting, you can bet it's D.
Re: (Score:2)
Which totally explains why their spiritual grandchildren are such big Trump fans...
Re: (Score:3)
You've got nothing but pretend dude. Look at the #s of people in the KKK. It basically no longer exists. About the same number of idiots as Antifa. Lunatic fringe is lunatic, duh.
Re: Well, I'm not glad he is gone, but I am not sa (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, the election evidence shows that the GOP absorbed the Peripheral South and gained in the South primarily from the importing transplants into the region, not by converting Dixiecrats and Democratic Party KKK leaders like Robert Byrd into Republicans. The racist Democrats in the Solid South primarily stayed Democrats. The GOP got more votes from the non-racists, both among the existing population and from immigrants from other States to turn the South into their voting block, beginning with the least (not most) racist States. The details have been written up in many places, but here’s one I found with a quick Google search [claremont.org] if you’re looking for more details.
To quote that article in relation to the myth you keep trying to spread:
"Starting in the 1950s, the South attracted millions of Midwesterners, Northeasterners, and other transplants. These "immigrants" identified themselves as Republicans at higher rates than native whites. In the 1980s, up to a quarter of self-declared Republicans in Texas appear to have been such immigrants. Furthermore, research consistently shows that identification with the GOP is stronger among the South's younger rather than older white voters, and that each cohort has also became more Republican with time. Do we really believe immigrants were more racist than native Southerners, and that younger Southerners identified more with white solidarity than did their elders, and that all cohorts did so more by the 1980s and '90s than they had earlier?
In sum, the GOP's Southern electorate was not rural, nativist, less educated, afraid of change, or concentrated in the most stagnant parts of the Deep South. It was disproportionately suburban, middle-class, educated, younger, non-native-Southern, and concentrated in the growth-points that were, so to speak, the least "Southern" parts of the South."
Or as the NY Times put it [nytimes.com]:
"In the postwar era, they note, the South transformed itself from a backward region to an engine of the national economy, giving rise to a sizable new wealthy suburban class. This class, not surprisingly, began to vote for the party that best represented its economic interests: the G.O.P. Working-class whites, however — and here’s the surprise — even those in areas with large black populations, stayed loyal to the Democrats. (This was true until the 90s, when the nation as a whole turned rightward in Congressional voting.)
The two scholars support their claim with an extensive survey of election returns and voter surveys. To give just one example: in the 50s, among Southerners in the low-income tercile, 43 percent voted for Republican Presidential candidates, while in the high-income tercile, 53 percent voted Republican; by the 80s, those figures were 51 percent and 77 percent, respectively. Wealthy Southerners shifted rightward in droves but poorer ones didn’t."
Re: (Score:2)
BYTE's Cover price. (Score:2)
One of the best parts of Byte (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in '87, the tax laws were changing so that you couldn't deduct magazine subscriptions as a business expense. That didn't matter to me, but they made a special offer of a six-year subscription for $99. By the time that ran out in '93, Byte had gotten... boring. It seemed like it was nothing but reviews, and stuff that would mostly be of interest to IT department types. Except for one thing, Jerry's column. That was the only reason left for me to care about Byte, and it wasn't enough to get me to renew again.
It was good to read about the various problems he would encounter and overcome, and it was also good to know that someone else cared about keyboard layouts. Back around that time, lots of crap was being done to keyboard layouts, obviously by people who had never learned to touch-type. The worst were the broken backspace key (usually a backslash between +/= and a tiny backspace key) making the right pinky have to go too far, something between Z and left shift making the left pinky have to go too far (hey, if the Europeans do it, it must be good!), and big return keys, usually resulting in the \| key pushing something else around. But I've been a Mac guy since 1985, and Apple managed to avoid such annoyances in their keyboards. Fortunately, a sane layout won, at least in the US.
I still have a couple of old Northgate keyboards, and a stack of Model Ms that I acquired over the years, and I hope to get around to replacing their guts with a "bluepill" board running my own USB code. But it won't do me a lot of good, since most of my typing these days is done on a laptop, where there just isn't room for a good mechanical keyboard.
Anyhow, I tried to see if I could look at his most recent Chaos Manor postings, but it appears that the database behind it has overloaded. At least the page linked in TFS seems to have been made static.
Re:One of the best parts of Byte (Score:4, Interesting)
Chaos Manor was always one of the first things I read in Byte. I liked Jerry's (sometimes brutally) honest reviews; he only wrote about things he actually used himself. And of course his humour; writing about the infamous Clipper chip (a proposed mandatory cryptography module with a backdoor for law enforcement) he wrote that if you believed the assurances that the backdoor would not be abused, "then I am Queen Marie of Romania".
Re:One of the best parts of Byte (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah yes, Northgate keyboards.
That was when the world was, well, noisier. But it felt so good....
Re: (Score:2)
I remember those years. I made a wall poster with the front cover of every BYTE magazine. It's strange to see each magazine cover and know that was one month of your life at high-school and college.
The early 1970's magazines covered electronics, circuit boards and home brew electronics as home computers weren't around then. Everyone had to make their own S-100 rack based systems. Having a graphics card was an optional extra for those systems. In the late 1970's, micro-processors came along, and there were a
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: One of the best parts of Byte (Score:2)
Amen brother
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
SciAm turned to crap in the early '00s, when they went full-force with the "climate change" memes. ...
Byte only went as far to make me not care, SciAm went much farther by going out of their way to push a left-wing agenda.
SciAm talking about global warming, something that about 97 percent of climate scientists agree is real and largely caused by humans, is entirely appropriate for a science magazine and has nothing to do with left or right wing politics.
Re: (Score:3)
That phrase does not mean what you think it does, but carry on anyway.
Damn it. (Score:5, Interesting)
I read Jerry's science fiction back when he was writing for Analog Science Fiction magazine, and later had the opportunity to work with him at Byte magazine. Byte even flew me out to Chaos Manor to get him up to speed on their new BIX system, a computer conferencing system (a pre-Web forerunner to systems like /., Ars Technica, etc.) based on software I wrote. He invited me to a party where I met the likes of Larry Niven, Bob Silverberg and Poul Anderson.
I later worked with him, Niven, Anderson and a number of other writers, scientists and astronauts as part of the Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy. We (mostly he) helped get the DC-X project started -- reusable, vertical-takeoff-and-landing rocket technology that SpaceX built on for their Falcon launcher.
He inspired me to start selling my writing, both non-fiction and later fiction. In fact, by a series of events I won't go into here (but involving the Council and an International Space Development Conference) he led to me meeting the woman I later married. When we had twin boys, we briefly (very briefly) considered naming them Jerry and Larry.
His passing isn't a complete surprise; he was getting on in years and he had had health issues in recent years, but it is still sad to see him gone. My condolences to his family, who were all very gracious when I visited his home.
Ad astra, Jerry.
A brilliant individual is gone. (Score:5, Interesting)
I got to know Jerry personally when I started writing for BYTE back in 1984. While I had read his BYTE column as well as much of his science fiction writings to date (both solo and with Larry Niven), what I didn't appreciate until some fact time with him was how much he knew about so many subjects. "Chaos Manor" (his name for the house that he and Roberta lived in in Studio CIty) was so named because of the shelves and stacks of books everywhere, on every conceivable subject. Jerry had a BA/MA in psychology and a PhD in political science; he was also an army vet, and did a lot of consulting for the US government, both in terms of the military and the space program. He also had what was pretty much a photographic memory. When I would argue with him on subjects, he'd bring up facts and figures from a vast array of sources.
He also didn't suffer fools gladly, which is why he ticked off so many people. :-) Also, he knew too much for them to prove him wrong, which these days is an unforgivable sin. ..bruce..
Re: A brilliant individual is gone. (Score:2)
Cool Story. Must have been an honor. Thanks for sharing.
Re: (Score:2)
Hey Bruce! Sorry that it's under such circumstances, but it's good to hear (if indirectly) from you again. Your post is spot on.
-- al, from BIX
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Except some of the "fools" he didn't suffer weren't fools at all, and it was Pournelle who took pointlessly contrarian positions. His views on Climate Change, biology and vaccines were not the views of a thoughtful man, but rather someone who just had emotional responses to things he didn't like. As I say elsewhere, I enjoyed his writing, but he became a full on crank by the 1990s.
Re: (Score:3)
I knew Jerry in meatspace (from about 1990 onward), and while he was often loudly opinionated, he was never a crank. His views were always reasoned, and he was careful about distinguishing the factual from the emotional. And he was never swayed by political correctness.
I wasn't a fan, and I didn't particularly like him, but I learned to respect him.
A sad day (Score:3)
I seem to be a bit unusual in that I didn't learn about him from reading his science fiction books, and I didn't learn about him from reading his magazine columns. A search for some computer problem led me to an entry in his day book where he had dealt with a similar problem.
Nowadays, we'd call it a blog, making it possibly one of the oldest such on the internet, but the format at the time was one page per week, with new topics added at the bottom as the week went on. There was a second one, for his correspondence. For many years, every Monday, I would load up the pages from the previous week and read bits and pieces as free time presented itself.
I didn't always agree with him, but the wisdom available (from him and his incredible readership via email) was unmatched.
In addition to current events and computers, he also included pieces on his family, his dogs, his health, opera, TV, etc. Reading it for a while, it felt like you knew him. So, one day when I was in LA, I took a wrong turn and ended up, I suspect within a few blocks from his house. I mused that if I had known I was going to be that close, I should have made arrangements to stop in to meet him and shake his hand.
When I got home a few days later, I emailed him to ask if he accepted drop-ins, should I ever find myself out that way again. He said that he'd be delighted, assuming that he was home and didn't have other plans, of course.
Sadly, I haven't been out west since then, and now I've missed the chance.
I would like to add one thing - it would be nice if people remembered his small, but meaningful, contribution to the space program, and also his role in helping win the Cold War.
Yup, he proselytized - ineffectively... (Score:4, Interesting)
I recently had a "whatever happened to" moment and spent an evening reading his more recent opinion posts, and it was kind of sad to see him become more hardened into an increasingly bitter-sounding, yes, even Trumpist view of the world over time. The one where civilization is always falling into disrepair from the gradual takeover of ever-expanding bureaucracy and government control.
Go back a ways and you can see all the attitudes there - the "Fallen Angels" book from 1991 isn't just about how an ice age is far more likely than this liberal global warming theory (which the liberals in the book stick to even as mile-high ice sheets wipe out Canada and are eating Wisconsin), it's about how government with liberal concerns becomes a kind of fascist dictatorship, controlling individual economic choices and oppressing honest scientists who won't toe a party line.
And then there's Mote in Gods Eye which proposes an enemy which must be inherently treated like an enemy no matter how nice and reasonable they are as individuals, because as a race, they breed like flies... and just can't help but displace us utterly from the universe if we let them out of their cage. Which are defeated by a hereditary nobility, because feudalism turned out to be the best way to bring order to our race in an age of star travel.
But you know something? It didn't work. Not on me, nor on a bunch of friends I have that all enjoy SF; we all read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress without turning libertarian, and I must have read Starship Troopers 3 times but am not militarist, and certainly Jerry and Larry didn't turn me into a feudalist who fears that the teeming hordes of populous countries will overrun us like army ants. It was all just fiction, I enjoyed it, by my core politics were not particularly affected by it.
People who get upset when authors weave their opinions into their work all need to take a deep breath: if YOU can see it, can you possibly credit the rest of us with seeing it, too? We can filter our own inputs, honest: we live in a world of advertising. [Criticized for advertising certain products to the very young, advertisers today plead back that their sneakiest approaches can't break through the suspicious natures of modern kids: by nine, they know the toy isn't really as fun as it looks on TV.]
So, yeah, I sputtered with disbelief at his column when Obamacare was enacted, raging that for the first time in his life he was now held responsible for the medical care of complete strangers - I supposed he'd never before in his life considered complete strangers over 65, despite being there himself - but I bid him farewell with sorrow. He gave me a lot of fun hours in fantasyland, and a lot of fun hours reading about the latest in WORM drives (look it up) and literally a hundred other technologies that have come, and mostly gone, all building the world's most exciting industry. I thank him for his opinions even though I shared few; testing my reasoning against his was good for me.
Jerry-haters can take some comfort, if you feel mean today: Jerry's fondest youthful dreams for The Future (i.e. now) were all cruelly disappointed. We got no moonbase, no space industries, no asteroid miners. Worse yet, while Jerry may have convinced himself that NASA bureaucracy and general liberal anti-science budget cutting were at fault, I doubt it; he was opinionated but not irrational. And the painful fact is that no private industry was ever found for space.
Jerry's stories always featured a booming space industry by 2020 because zero-gee manufacturing was going to lead to ultra-fast computer chips, amazing new drugs, and ultra-strong materials. No such private, commercial reason to build in space ever materialized, despite billions of dollars of publicly-funded experiments to find such industrial processes. That's a shame for a space dreamers, but it's nobody's fault, it's just a scientific fact about the universe: space is way harder to conquer and way less rewarding than we hoped. Some front
Re: (Score:3)
Yet we live in a time when private entrepreneurs are opening up space as never before.
Re: (Score:3)
Unless you mean "as [private industry has] never before", I beg to differ.
Call me when Elon has done six moon landings, a few Mars crawlers, and some gas giant probes.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, he's opening it up in the sense of making the easier stuff cheaper.
Re: (Score:3)
Call me when Elon has done six moon landings, a few Mars crawlers, and some gas giant probes.
Yes: to conceal a crappy argument, move the goalposts.
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry, didn't intend to: what were those previous goal posts? It was fair to say a few suborbital flights are "opening up space as never before"? I always had the goalposts of "doing more than NASA has already done" for that sentence, and my reply did admit that if he meant "by private industry" then his comment was agreed to.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Pournelle never had any grasp of that very fundamental thing in human endeavor called "economics", which is where all space-mining, colonies-on-the-moon fantasies and such fail if they ever touch it in the slightest degree. Spaceflight hardware of any sort is simply too expensive to move "off Earth" without increasing economic productivity by another couple of orders of magnitude. When it takes the labor of 100,000 to put one man in space (paying the bills, or building and maintaining the systems) space tra
RIP Jerry Pournellle (Score:2)
He will be missed (Score:2)
Both for his SF and his Byte columns.
My obituary [lawrenceperson.com].
It was personal (Score:3)
The Cover (Score:2)
Does anyone here besides me remember BYTE for the incredibly clever artwork on their covers where someone would make sculptures out of electronic components? I used to love looking at that.
Re: (Score:2)
We Can All Agree... (Score:2)
As gentlemen, we can disagree about details of his philosophy or politics, and still have respect for the man. I think no one here would dispute that we have lost a first class mind and highly capable writer. Let us then celebrate his work, let us raise a mouse (or a glass if you prefer) in his honor, for one of our own has fallen and he shall be with us no more. 8-(
Footfall and SDI (Score:2)
My favourite story about Pournelle is the synchronicity between "Footfall" and SDI. Footfall is probably one of the very best novels of the alien invasion genre. At one point, the president of the United States calls a conference of SciFi writers to look for ideas on how to defeat the alien invaders. Shortly afterwards (in real life), Reagan calls a conference of SciFi writers to come up with ideas for the Strategic Defence Initiative. Pournelle was part of that group (and his wo
Thanks for all the fish (Score:2)
Jerry is one of the few names I clearly remember from the many years I followed Byte. As a young, non-English-speaking boy, Byte is partly responsible for my interest in computers — and for my domain of English, mainly of a technical variety.
So, in the later years I didn't like so much Jerry's viewpoints, but he was a clear influence in my life, and in my choice of career.
Anyway... Thanks for all the fish.
Great article from Sarah Hoyt on his passing (Score:3)
There is a great article [pjmedia.com] from author Sarah Hoyt on Jerry, who by all accounts was really helpful to other writers - I liked a lot of JP stuff but it's even more impressive to think of all the other great SF the world has today he may have helped foster.
Of special note is that Jerry was truly open minded and not really part of the political spectrum as some here are trying to paint him. From the article:
In fact, that to me was Jerryâ(TM)s characteristic: in an age riven by deep political divisions, he refused to draw a political line, and associated with people on both sides of the spectrum, treating all as humans and worthy â" or not worthy â" of his attention. (Yes, I do remember a few comments of âoeweâ(TM)re done hereâ in answer to less-than-stellar arguments.) If anyone drew a political color line, it was not Jerry. In fact, he urged me more than once to be forgiving of things that colleagues on the left side of the spectrum said while in the heat of battle. Heâ(TM)d point out the good things theyâ(TM)d said â" or done, or written â" and find excuses for their more intemperate behavior.
It's worth remembering that these days, if you do not agree with some people 100% they will consider you a vile enemy, to be tarnished and dismissed. The world is better off with people like Jerry, who welcome discussion from all and treat everyone as human regardless as viewpoint. We would all do well to remember his example.
All thnigs said and done (Score:4, Interesting)
I met Jerry decades ago at a Soldier of Fortune convention to which my then boyfriend had dragged me. As the days progressed my attire morphed somewhat, to John's obvious delight. In those days I was pretty decent looking. Then I got sadder and wider instead of wiser. So I was dressed down somewhat extremely when John and I were sitting at one of the Sahara Hotel's (RIP) bars awaiting Jerry's presentation. We were talking about an observation I, an engineer in the RF communications field, had noticed. I asked John to back me if I went over to ask Jerry about it.
Jerry had just been approached by a trophy hunter who tried to bed the macho men at the SoF convention and write a book about it. Jerry had brushed her off. So I walked over. He expected another proposition. "May I ask a question about the people here at the convention?"
He allowed me to ask. So I asked something like this (the exact quote is lost in time), "For a collection of men who are obviously interested in the art of warfare why in heck is there no communications equipment on display along with the firearms in the huckster room?"
Jerry performed the best double-take I have ever seen. His expression went through states faster than I could register. Finally with a mildly bewildered look he allowed as how he didn't know and that it was indeed a good question. Then we went off to his presentation.
Some time later I got into my car with John and we went to the local Science Fiction and Fantasy club, LASFS. Jerry was there and recognized me. We had fun talking dirty, I mean techie both PCs and novels.
Along about 1985 when BYTE Magazine's online service BIX was being beta tested Jerry whispered to me during a LASFS meeting, "Don't leave before you talk to me." So outside we talked. He gave me the instructions for accessing BIX's beta test. I didn't know he was a damn pusher! {^_-} It infected me so badly that by the time BIX's lights were turned out I was the head moderator on the system and getting paid for my addiction.
During all this time I never once saw Jerry as anything other than an old style gentleman to those who treated him fairly and decently. If I had to grade how much I respected him on a scale of one to ten it would be something like 15. We didn't always agree. But he respected me and I respected him. (And I still think the Commodore Amiga was better than either the Macintosh or the IBM PC of the same era. {^_-})
Damn I'm going to miss him even though I've been expecting it and dreading that it would happen someday. Warranties expire. His did. Mine is in the process. Still, losing him is a serious loss. I sit here imagining his parade ground tenor happily giving God some computer advice to make his job easier or spinning yet another good yarn.
Jerry, please rest in peace. Your legacy will live on for a long time.
{^_^} Joanne Dow
Re:Terrible news (Score:5, Insightful)
Too bad for you. You missed out on some great books and a magazine that helped define early PCs and programming.
Go back to your mobile device and continue ignoring the world.
Re: Terrible news (Score:2)
I was back home a few weeks ago cause my parents warnt I sell it. I was horrified to see my mom had tossed my dads collection of Bytes in the dumpster. One or two very specific articles had a deep and profound influence on my career. Loved the cover art too.
Re: (Score:2)
PDF has harsher transients, whereas paper sounds warmer with a more rounded bass.
Re: (Score:2)
PDF has harsher transients, whereas paper sounds warmer with a more rounded bass.
And to get the best experience from paper, I always use my $1000 Monster reading glasses.
Re:Terrible news (Score:5, Interesting)
Until Dr. Dobbs, BYTE was the technical go to computer magazine about what was happening in computers.
I credit them with almost everything I've learned about computers (despite having multiple EE degrees). When I was a little kid, I'd go to the library and spend hours a day reading all of the periodicals. BYTE was my favourite,even though I had no idea what they were talking about. I read every issue from 1975 until I got a subscription the early 90's when it took a huge dive in quality
Byte (Score:5, Insightful)
Byte was THE magazine to read for general computer news in the late 80's and early 90's. I have a bunch of them and I re-read them from time to time. This is back when nobody knew what was coming down the pipe, or what would even work. You had document-based object-oriented application paradigms being tried out, all kinds of new languages, new processor and hardware architectures being tried out. Weird storage mediums (floptical? ZIP drives? MO Drives?) By today's standards, weird OSes being tried out (BeOS, OS/2, even QNX made a bid for the desktop)
Now the big research goes into what kind of screens the next smartphones will have, or how much faster the next version of the same graphics card you own will be.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Um, the price of graphics cards has nothing to do with Virtual Reality.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Of course what is driving GPU technology at the moment is mostly Bitcoins and crypto-currencies in general. Ever since folks figured out that setting up a server farm of hundreds of GPUs could literally print money, the financial incentive to buy them up has been enormous. Their use in graphics is sort of a sideline when viewed from that perspective. If you can sell a GPU for more than it was a year ago, that is precisely the reason.
Yes, AI technology has been doing well too as has virtual reality stuff.
Re: (Score:2)
Or whether corporation/project XYZ has a sufficient quota of left-handed albino furries.
He helped create the future (Score:5, Interesting)
Take a look in the Sci-Fi section of Amazon or a local bookstore. Mr. Pournelle made some terrific contributions to the genre. "The Mote in God's Eye" being my favourite, a collaboration between him and Larry Niven (I also really liked "Oath of Fealty") but he wrote a number of very entertaining novels as well as edited a lot of great anthologies - seeing his name on a book meant is was definitely worth reading.
In regards to Byte, I was in university at the time and I remember that other students and, more than a few professors, would go directly to his articles - he gave a different, less hyped, picture of Silicon Valley, the products, some of the people, and what was really happening and what was important. What I found most useful was his (along with family and staff) tribulations in trying out new products and setting them up - a lot of wisdom for what would be later known as "User Experience".
He hasn't written a lot in the last twenty years, but he left his mark in a very positive way.
Re:He helped create the future (Score:5, Informative)
Most of what he has written in the past twenty years is mostly on his blog. He wrote quite a bit on politics (a pretty staunch libertarian but with Republican leanings) and climatology (where he was definitely in the "skeptic" camp).
One of his largest accomplishments was being on the President's Space Council where he was one of the backers and political supporters of the DC-X. He personally got into the lobbying effort to get funding for that project through Congress... something that as a project developed many of the theories and ideas for VTOL orbital spacecraft. Without the DC-X it is unlikely that SpaceX would have been able to their their Falcon 9 to land the way it did.
His largest political failure was a proposed lunar exploration prize program similar to the X-Prize but on a larger scale. He got the Republican House leadership (including the then-speaker Newt Gingrich) to accept his idea of basically appropriating $10 billion toward the first three companies that would successfully send and return astronauts to the Moon in the 1990's. After getting the House leadership on board including the minority ranking members (Democrats) of the Science and Space committees, Newt got into his own political mess that ended up killing the whole idea. I can only imagine what might have been had that proposal actually gone forward.
Mr. Pournelle knew Dan Quayle too (through the Space Council), but he pretty much dropped out of politics in such a direct manner after Bill Clinton was elected except through commentary like I mentioned above.
It could be argued that Jerry Pournelle also pioneered the idea of a blog on the web and was one of the first to do that where he entered some of his first entries as hand written HTML.... definitely doing that well before the word itself was coined. He did it as a way to continue his Chaos Manner series even post Byte, but went in different directions as well.
Re:He helped create the future (Score:5, Interesting)
mykepredko enthused:
Take a look in the Sci-Fi section of Amazon or a local bookstore. Mr. Pournelle made some terrific contributions to the genre.
-1 Disagree
As an SF writer, Pournelle was, at best, a hack. Were it not for Larry Niven, he'd be known only for his Byte column. As a writer of fiction, his prose was pedestrian, his characters one-dimensional, and his philosophy repugnant.
He was also an intolerant, alchoholic narcissist.
I know I'm going to attract a lot of hate for the above, but hear me out before you downmod me.
At an SF convention in the Bay Area, he was on a panel discussing the Reagan Star Wars initiative - and pretty strident in his advocacy of it. After the panel discussion concluded, one of the attendees approached him to engage him in debate about the program. The guy made it clear that he disagreed with Pournelle about the initiative's technical feasibility, was concerned by its projected cost, and felt that it would decrease geopolitical stability. He made his points calmly and respectfully, and he stood his ground, despite Pournelle calling him a Communist and a traitor. When he pointed out that ad hominems didn't address his factual arguments, Pournelle sucker-punched him.
I was there. I witnessed it. And whatever respect I might have had for Jerry Pournelle permanently vanished the moment he resorted to violence to silence someone who presented zero physical threat, merely because he didn't like what the man had to say.
That action is of a piece with the facsistic philosophy he espoused via his fantasy doppelganger John Christian Falkenberg, and is best exemplified by Falkenberg's "final solution" to the problem of overpopulation of the planet Hadley by involuntarily-transported convict-colonists. Falkenberg conspires to trap them in the capitol city's stadium, then orders his troopers to murder literally thousands of them - and Pournelle presents this act of mass murder with a straight face as somehow necessary, noble, and right.
It's an absolutely classic example of narcissist wish-fulfillment: treating the lives people of whose political views and power he disapproves as subhuman, and therefore legitimate targets of genocide ... all for the "greater good", of course. And, because Falkenberg has the "strength" to murder thousands whose only crime is that he considers them surplus population, Pournelle presents this despicable atrocity as admirable and praiseworthy.
It turned my stomach when I read it in Analog as a 20-something, and it still revolts me today.
It was clear to me then that Pournelle desperately wanted to be Gordon R. Dickson and the Falkenberg chronicles was his attempt to re-imagine the Childe Cycle from a far-right perspective - and minus all that nauseating, limp-wristed, left-wing compassion and humanity with which Dickson insisted on spoiling his narrative. Humanity and compassion had no place in Pournelle's philosophy. To him they were unnecessary distractions that should ruthlessly be dispensed with, along with the undeserving hordes of subhuman trash.
What makes Pournelle's fiction particualrly dull is that he constantly indulged himself in polemical justifications for his principal characters' psychopathic actions by constructing antagonists who were uniformly, relentlessly unidimensional caricatures, rather than characters. No one who disagreed with what he presented as ideologically-correct attitudes, strategies, and philosophies displays ANY characteristics other than unwavering venality and profound physical cowardice. (Well, okay, I'll concede that some of them also exhibit ham-fisted duplicity, as well.) They barely even aspire to the status of straw men, much less fully-realized, three-dimensional characters complete with depth, nuance, and complexity. They are, without exception, not so much cartoons as stick figures.
Of course, the same can fairly be said of Pournelle's protagonists, so that's
Re:He helped create the future (Score:5, Interesting)
slaker observed:
I really wish this were modded up. I've been active in various parts of literary SF fandom for a some time and while I can't say I have had any direct interaction with him, I've heard more Jerry Pournelle horror stories than any two other writers, even when one of them is Harlan Ellison.
As it turns out, I had a Harlan moment, too.
It was at the Worldcon in St. Louis in 1969. The Heidelberg delegation threw a raging party to celebrate their city being picked as the host for the next Worldcon. Bathtub full of beer - good beer, not that Annhauser-Busch crap - genuine Absinthe, heavy on the wormwood, Goldschlager before that became a frat-boy thing, schnapps for days. It was pretty well-attended, as you might imagine, including by the underaged yours truly, and a good time was had by all ...
... until Harlan showed up.
Now this was pretty much the peak of Harlan's fame. He had just won the Hugo for his short story The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, A Boy and His Dog (which had won a Hugo the previous year) was being made into a movie, based on his own screenplay, Dangerous Visions had won two years earlier (and thereby established his cred as an editor and anthologist), and The City on the Edge of Forever had taken the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation the previous year. All of that undoubtedly went to his head - as did, I suspect, a certain quantity of Bolivian marching powder, and an undoubtedly significant dosage of alcohol, as well.
So he was definitely feeling his oats when he rolled into the party with a fawning hottie on each arm. I was sitting on the floor, doing a pretty credible job of holding up the wall as they entered, close enough for me to visually confirm that neither woman was burdened by underclothing. (Ah, miniskirts - how I miss you!). Anyway, as Harlan stood there in his $800 suit, chin outthrust, clearly reveling in his status as lord of all he surveyed, and only slightly unsteady on his feet, a teenage girl with bad skin, braces, glasses with Coke-bottle lenses, a white cardigan, and a poodle skirt appeared in front of him, trembling in awe at the glory of his physical presence in the same room, a copy of Dangerous Visions clutched to her bosom.
"Oh, Mr. Ellison," she gushed, "I just love your work! I've read everything you've written. Would you please do me the honor of signing my copy of Dangerous Visions?"
Himself inspected her as if she were a particularly unappetizing invertebrate he'd discovered squirming under under a freshly-lifted rock.
"You," he announced, "are a worthless, little piece of shit. I'm here to enjoy myself, not sign autographs for the likes of you. Go the fuck away. And stay the fuck away."
That was my first lesson in why it's a bad idea to meet your heroes. That poor, dumpy girl reacted as if Harlan had punched her in the face, physically recoling from his casual viciousness; the very picture of profound public humiliation. Clutching herself in emotional pain, she scurried away, tears cataracting down her crumpled face, and vanished into the depths of the Germans' suite.
Just for a moment, I considered jumping to my feet and confronting the little prick on her behalf - but I was 17, and seriously stoned, and he was Harlan fucking Ellison ... and the moment passed.
it was years before I began to forgive Harlan for that act of narcissistic cruelty. Only when I learned that he had given the late, great Theodore Sturgeon free lodging in his Mad Hatter's mansion in the L.A. hills, and paid his medical bills during his final illness did I finally, grudgingly concede that he might - just might - have some semblance of a human heart hiding within that puffin chest.
Maybe.
But I've never forgotten the way he deliberately, publicly stabbed a teenaged girl in the heart for no defensible reason. And I'm utterly certain that she has never forgotten it, either ...
Re: (Score:3)
Never heard of him. Byte magazine?
Yes, and for "Lucifer's Hammer."
Re: (Score:2)
His Codominion series was pretty awesome (Mote was in that universe as I recall). I'd heard he'd been thinking about continuing it, sadly that won't happen now.
Re: (Score:3)
BYTE magazine was the dominant magazine for electronic and software engineers from the mid 1970's until the mid 1990's (when they went all pastel coloured and corporate IT). It was published each month and articles on everything from building your own home security system to software simulations and making your own VGA graphics card.
Early issues covered everything from cellular automata like John Conway's game of Life to fractals and networking with TCP/IP.
If you look around, you can find old scans of BYTE
Re: Terrible news (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Terrible news (Score:4, Insightful)
On the gripping hand, ...
Nicely done.
Re: Liked him (Score:2, Insightful)
All of his colabs with Niven were always a great read.
Also "Falkenberg's Legion" was an excellent read.
He may be gone, but his writing will be with us for ever.
Re: (Score:3)
Godwin in 9 - you guys are slipping a bit. Let's tighten it up.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
No, his politics have always been fucked up.
He even liked Newt Gingrich!
Jerry had an interesting style of writing.
It's too bad he never wrote anything original of consequence.
His appearance in Byte marked the start of it's decline.
There were so many interesting things going on at that time.
Why would anyone be interested in the myopic view of Chaos Manor?
Not anyone with a deep interest in the evolving technology.
Kinda like what is happening to Slashdot these days.
Pournelle, BYTE & its decline? (Score:4, Interesting)
No comments on what you think of his politics - to each his own, but how did his appearance in BYTE have anything to do w/ its decline? He just had a 1-2 page essay at the end of every magazine. If one bought it for just that, it'd be one thing, but typically, one would go there after reading the bulk of the issue - the cover story, any articles on subjects of interest, be it the latest CPU, Y2K, workstation lineups, et al. I myself didn't often read them: I mainly found a few articles of his where he described his experience w/ OS/2 Warp 3.0 when it surfaced.
BYTE declined partly due to the 'consolidation' of the industry, and also the fact that it seemed geared towards a niche readership. The print edition was doing badly, and in its last 2 years, it was considerably thinner than it used to be.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Sadly he became a Trumpist in his last days (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, yes and no. He had strong and not always rational views on many things. I still remember him arguing that Basic was a superior language over C. The real reason was that he just did not understand C, but the dizzying logic he used to come up with an alternative explanation for his preference was both scary and entertaining. Similar for his political views: they were a disappointment because they were argued just as poorly.
However, the main reason they were a disappointment was that on many other things he HAD a very rational and well-reasoned view. He knew what he wanted, he was very willing to spend time and money to get what he wanted, and he was very rational about it, on his own terms. That was important at the time as a counterweight to all those lofty ideas about what computers could and could not do, and all the technological geekery that went on in the rest of Byte. Arguing that Byte went downhill because of him is therefore just not reasonable. He was an important feature in Byte, and he had a unique view on the computer world that was important for that world.
Never Meet Your Heroes (Score:2, Funny)
Reading Chaos Manor was like meeting my hero.
And it turned out exactly as the adage predicts.
Re:Sadly he became a Trumpist in his last days (Score:4, Interesting)
When I corresponded with him, it actually began with my mild criticism of his anti-evolution stance, or rather his critique of Darwinism (I never got the feeling he was a creationist). He leaned towards some sort of panspermia (maybe that's the SF author coming out in him)j, and I just wrote him and said I thought all panspermia did was push the problem back. He went on about how no less than Fred Hoyle was a panspermia advocate. My response was simply that while Hoyle was a very good astronomer, he was speaking outside his field of expertise when critiquing abiogenesis on Earth or asserting extraterrestrial origins of life. He took some offense to that, mainly that a mere Internet dweller would question Fred Hoyle. It was a peculiar exchange that suggested to me that he had staked out his positions and had little interest in actual debate.
I still enjoyed his writing, his military SF was some of the best of that genre, though I clearly saw his beliefs and prejudices coming out in some of his stories, but that's no different than any writer.
Re:Sadly he became a Trumpist in his last days (Score:5, Interesting)
Panspermia has basically nothing to do with "evolution" in the Darwinist sense, all of that is the same. It only differs on the question of what got it started. Darwin didn't insist on a certain mechanism for Earth life to start, his argument is that all Earth life could evolve from a primordial form; panspermia is simply an offered primordial mechanism! Darwin talked about believing in "spontaneous generation" but also that he understood science to be not far advanced enough to handle the question. There is no reason at all to believe that panspermia is inconsistent with his views.
But the huge, gaping, unresolvable problem with the claim that panspermia is anti-Darwinist is that panspermia still supposes the exact same spontaneous generation as Darwin was considering, it simply moves it back to an earlier time in a different geographical place.
Re: (Score:2)
One thing that panspermia does address is to maximize the likelihood of life to seed a planet that has life supporting characteristics and make the Drake equation have at least one variable that is near 100% in terms of probability.
It is unlikely that panspermia has impacted only the Earth and perhaps a couple other planets that passed through one part of the Galaxy.
It also provides a mechanism to explain how something extremely unlikely to happen in one particular spot could still be virtually universal, f
Re: (Score:3)
I don't evaluate authors by their degree of cookie-cutter alignment with my own political views. If I did, I would have missed all the great Charles Stross that's out there now.
Re: (Score:3)
I can make arguments that at least some forms of BASIC are superior to C. Language holy wars are something that has existed since Grace Hopper created the first compiler. With object-oriented COBOL, it is hard to suggest that any particular language is necessarily good at everything.
C just happens to have a good code base and was taught to many CS students as something to create compilers... which made a plethora of compilers available
Re: (Score:3)
I can make arguments that at least some forms of BASIC are superior to C.
Quite possible, for some application areas. However, the arguments Mr. Pournelle gave for BASIC and against C showed that he did not understand C, and that he was not aware that he did not understand it.
Language holy wars are something that has existed since Grace Hopper created the first compiler.
Yes, but they are only interesting if the arguments are solid; coming as poorly armed as Mr. Pournelle to these wars is just tedious, and tells more about the person than the languages involved.
Re:Sadly he became a Trumpist in his last days (Score:4, Interesting)
Pournelle came from a time when United States patriotism was understood to be a good thing, and rightly so. He was brought up Roman Catholic, and that formed another base for his views. Like many with that combination of views, he did not understand the inherent conflict, and that showed up as holes in his arguments that he could not recognize.
Pournelle was extraordinarily intelligent. Many extraordinarily intelligent people learn early on that people who disagree with them are usually wrong, and for the sake of efficiency should be ignored or their arguments discarded without due consideration. However, his knowledge of many areas of history and current events was deep, wide, and insightful, resulting in his conclusions being much better than most people's.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No, not confusion caused by his debilitating health. He was drawn into the whole devolution of the modern conservative movement for many years.
I lost a lot of respect for him when he started spouting a lot of that nonsense well before the GWB days.
Good books though.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
He was always libertarian right. Guessing he'd be 'disappointed' with Trumps' level of competence at this point as he was very firmly of the "engineers can save the world" faction of the libertarian right.
Opposite is true (Score:2)
As you grow older, you gain clarity on a great many things - he was able to see Trump was no better or worse than any other U.S. President, which is sign you are not letting others dictate your thoughts.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Every R candidate for president back to Eisenhower has been Hitler...
Haven't you been paying attention? Swallowing bullshit takes practice, 'they' have lots and lots of practice.
Re: (Score:2)
Those are what you use when you're riding a dumb ass.
Re: (Score:3)
Considering he'd been a big fan of Gingrich, why would that surprise you? I actually corresponded with him briefly about a decade ago, and he was very much a libertarian with some isolationist tendencies. I didn't think much of his politics but immensely enjoyed his writing, even some of his essays
Re: (Score:2)
Who's counting?
Re: (Score:2)
I always got the feeling that the Moties were more Niven's creation than Pournelle's. Could be wrong, but they definitely had that Niven feel to them.
Re: (Score:2)
On the contrary. He'd read Dirk Pearson and Sandy Shaw's stuff, among others, and followed much of the advice. He was 84 when he died, not bad at all -- although we could have wished for more.
Problem with most anti-aging/life extension techniques is that they work best if started early (ie twenties). He was probably 50 when Pearson & Shaw's first book came out.
Re: (Score:2)