6 May
1997
6 May
'97
9:21 a.m.
About 9 years ago when I was in our end user support organization, I had
occasion to speak to Jerry. He was threatening to give QuickBasic a
scathing review because he couldn't get it to compile Mrs. Pournelle's
Reading Program (what else?) under Windows 386. He called up our
QuickBasic group manager and just about carved him a new orifice. I, as
the Windows support lead, was asked to call him on this very urgent,
sky-is-falling problem and help him out, since as you may have noticed
from years of columns, he never, ever calls support
himself. The
conversation went something like this:
Me: "Hi Mr. Pournelle, this is Kai with Microsoft Product Support..."
Jerry: "What the HELL are you DOING calling during my DINNER TIME?!?"
Me: "I'm sorry sir, I understood you had a very urgent issue, and I had
no way of knowing..."
Jerry: "YOU PEOPLE are MORONS! <blah blah blah blah>"
And things went downhill from there. Later on we finally got to the
problem, which as I recall was related to a bizarre SCSI adapter in that
silly Cheetah 386 he had, the one into which he would put any piece of
hardware any manufacturer ever sent to him for free.
Not a great experience. I spoke to him again a few months later on a
different issue, and he was no more lucid or logical on that occasion.
Kai
----------
From: Ward Griffiths and/or Lisa Rogers[SMTP:gram@cnct.com]
Reply To: classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu
Sent: Tuesday, May 06, 1997 2:01 PM
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
Subject: The decline and fall of Byte
On Tue, 6 May 1997, Captain Napalm wrote:
My own collection of Byte starts with August of
85 (Amiga 1000 is
the
cover story) and ends somewhere in late 89 or
early 90. The library
at the
university I attended had issues starting from
Jan '77 (which I read
8-).
The dates given here are approximate, looking at
a Byte from 1980,
then 1985
then 1990 will show almost three different
magazines.
-spc (It started sliding when Robert Tinney stopped doing magazine
covers,
(~87) then it nose dived once Steve
Ciarcia stopped writing
hardware
articles, (~88 or 89) although there are
some that think it
started
way back in '77 when Pournelle
started his column)
Well, most of my older Byte magazines were destroyed by water several
moves ago, and I wouldn't mind acquiring most of them again. I had
mostly
given up on Byte in the mid-eighties, but in recent years I've wound
up
with a subscription (recently finally expired) due to McGraw-Hill
ceasing
publication of more useful magazines. Ciarcia's articles were always
excellent (and I know that most of them were released in book form
awhile
back), and his current magazine, "Circuit Cellar Ink" is pretty good,
especially if you're a serious hardware hacker as I no longer am.
Actually, nowadays, Pournelle's column is about the only thing I read
in
the magazine, and now that it's available on the web (with extra
text), I
really don't care to subscribe. Opinions vary concerning Jerry
Pournelle.
I've known him for over twenty years due to our mutual interest in
science
fiction and membership in the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society (I'm
still a member despite living in New Jersey -- Death Shall Not Release
You!). Over the years we've had a lot of conversations and arguments,
about politics (he's in favor of having a government, I'm opposed),
about
space development (we're both in favor) and computers (I was a
Shacker,
and while I was living elsewhere on the continent he had bad
experiences
with a very early TRS-80 and the company rather hurt themselves by
being
uncooperative and ignorant of the power of the press -- which is why
after
I showed him one of the first Model 100s, he went out and got a NEC
equivalent). He's a man of strong opinions who's always trying to
learn
something new and so am I. Really, he should be a member of this
mailing
list -- he's experienced directly more of the history of computers
than
most of us who've worked and played with them. That plus having the
clout
to get information from the movers and shakers.
--
Ward Griffiths
"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within
the system, but too early to shoot the bastards." --Claire Wolfe