Jerry Pournelle Parody

From: John Foust <jfoust_at_threedee.com>
Date: Tue Aug 4 12:12:40 1998

At 10:17 PM 8/3/98 -0400, Ward Donald Griffiths III wrote:
>
>Remember that Jerry's column used to be called "The User's Column".
>not "The Engineer's Column". His perspective is on "using" the
>damned stuff, and the stuff that doesn't die in infancy due to
>hardware failure or simple unusability he will try for several
>months.

If I wanted to hear the travails of clueless users, I'd get a job
in tech support. JP's "experience" with new products (as in the
parody, having unlimited amounts of support, from the techs to the
president of said company) was entirely out-of-this-world and
arguably not useful to Byte's readers. It's hard enough to
pick the right bleeding-edge products when you get opinions from
smart people. But our exchange here perhaps shows why the editors
loved him as a columnist - he stated strong opinions, and he caused
strong reactions.

>> I recently saw a summary of the mindset of the Pournellian branch
>> of science fiction as "Space is like Texas, only bigger."
>
>What other writers are in that branch? Reply privately unless it
>means old computers. Or at least send me a pointer to that summary,

I believe it was in Greg Benford's (?) book review of Tom Disch's (?)
overview of the SF field, in this month's Reason magazine.

- John
Received on Tue Aug 04 1998 - 12:12:40 BST