4 ms·

Jerry Pournelle I could have easily lived without. He had piles of his hardware and software given to him, and he had high level access into various companies

Jerry Pournelle I could have easily lived without. He had piles of his hardware and software given to him, and he had high level access into various companies when he had a problem because of his position at Byte. Couldn't relate, and never understood why people enjoyed his articles that much. OTOH, Steve Ciarcia was like a god to me. The variety and scope of his projects was crazy. I built his BASIC-52 controller board (point to point wiring FTW!) and hung a 2x16 LCD display and SPO256-AL2 speech synthesizer off of it. I marvelled at his "parallel processor" Mandelbrot generator. Every month was one amazing design after another, and I credit him as one of the people that sent me on my path to my EE degree.

southern_cross 8y ago
One thing I liked about Jerry Pournelle was that whenever he reviewed something he usually gave a blow-by-blow description of all of the problems that he ran into and how he worked around them. Some folks gave him grief about this, but I could relate because I often ran into exactly the same problems that he did. Meanwhile other reviewers usually either glossed over this stuff or just ignored it completely, lest they offend the vendor or Microsoft or whoever. This gave unsuspecting users the impression that installing and running this stuff was a piece of cake, when in fact it could be a real nightmare.
analog31 8y ago
Ciarcia helped inspire my career. I was in high school, had learned programming, but was also interested in electronics, math, physics, etc. I got an internship at a computing center, where the work just seemed terribly boring. Of course one person's boredom is another person's excitement. But "programming with solder" was exactly the thing that pulled it all together for me.
chadcmulligan 8y ago
Was that the 8052-AH Basic one? (Funny I still remember the numbers). I worked for a place where I built a commercial system using that. We used it for a couple of things, a nurse call system, a datalogger, just GP IO, was a great time.
- MegaDeKay 8y ago
  Exactly. And it is still out there if you want to download it (and the source!), burn an EPROM, and relive some memories. The code, along with some cool hardware designs, can be found here:. http://www.dos4ever.com/8031board/8031board.html#dialects http://www.dos4ever.com/8031board/8031board.html#dialects
DonHopkins 8y ago
Absolutely: Steve Ciarcia is a true god! http://circuitcellar.com/how-it-all-began/ http://circuitcellar.com/how-it-all-began/ On the other hand, Jerry Pournelle was notorious for threatening companies with bad reviews (and carrying out his threats) if they didn't give him free products. So in that sense, he was a pioneer in the field of Entitlement Blogging. https://www.facebook.com/WhiteMooseCafe/posts/2049013308712608 https://www.facebook.com/WhiteMooseCafe/posts/20490133087126... >The sense of entitlement is just too strong in the blogging community and the nastiness, hissy fits and general hate displayed after one of your members was not granted her request for a freebie is giving your whole industry a bad name. I never thought we would be inundated with negative reviews for the simple reason that somebody was required to pay for goods received or services rendered. Not only did he feel entitled to free (as in LOTS OF beer) hardware and software, but also to free ARPANET access, which he bragged about in Chaos Manor. And then he would make incoherent drunken accusations and threats in public to his benevolent benefactors at MIT, who finally got sick of him and flushed him. "How Jerry Pournelle got kicked off the ARPANET": http://www.stormtiger.org/bob/humor/pournell/story.html http://www.stormtiger.org/bob/humor/pournell/story.html He was so far ahead of his time, he would be working for the Trump administration if he were younger. They would have loved his enthusiasm for social darwinism. "Think of it as evolution in action." -POURNE https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/trump-is-the-candidate-2/ https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/trump-is-the-candi... "So what do I do? I agree with nearly everything he is for, but I’m better qualified to make it happen. I avoid some issues, but I go for his most popular ones and say, yeah! Want that! And I can make it happen better than he can. I’ve got the experience of working in government, but I’m not the establishment any more than Mr. Trump is. Heck, I’ll offer him a cabinet post. I could use his energy in my administration." -POURNE http://voxday.blogspot.nl/2016/04/jerry-pournelle-on-donald-trump.html http://voxday.blogspot.nl/2016/04/jerry-pournelle-on-donald-... "But he has never wavered on his desire to fill the Supreme Court with Justices as near in scholarship and view to Scalia as possible; that alone would be enough to get me to the polls for Trump if he’s nominated." -POURNE "One thing that is known about ARPA: you can be heaved off it for supporting the policies of the Department of Defense. Of course that was intended to anger me. If you have an ARPA account, please tell CSTACY that he was successful; now let us see if my Pentagon friends can upset him. Or perhaps some reporter friends. Or both., Or even the House Armed Services Committee." -POURNE The real reason POURNE was so unpopular with the people running the MIT-AI Lab during the 1980's had to do with the fact that he was a belligerent alcoholic who acted entitled to the free computer services and expert advice that he was taking for granted and criticizing, rather than his politics. In spite of the fact that many of those people who he accused of being "communists" went far out of their way to spend their precious time patiently answering his questions, tutoring and helping him (RMS even personally wrote some free software for him at his request -- how communist is that??!): https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reviews/bookmonth.html https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reviews/bookmonth.html >"I first met Richard Stallman (he called himself RMS in those days) when he was a graduate student at MIT and I was just learning about the ARPANET. He was immensely helpful to me in those days, patiently showing me things about emacs — his full-screen editor that he wrote in TECO, and the less said about TECO the better — as well as adding some special code to take care of things I wanted to accomplish. I learned then that RMS and I have a common failing: We don't suffer fools gladly or indeed at all, and we are sometimes wrong about who is a fool. But that's another story for another time." But POURNE certainly threatened to use his political connections as a weapon against them. POURNE is the one who made his own politics an issue, who told John McCarthy (the computer scientist, not Joseph the commie witch hunter) that he thought MIT was run by a bunch of communists, and who posted ranting threats on BIX. Just read the sputtering mis-punctuated threatening screed he posted to BIX, and decide for yourself if you think he was drunk, or if he just acted that way all the time purely because of his political beliefs: One thing that is known about ARPA: you can be heaved off it for supporting the policies of the Department of Defense. Of course that was intended to anger me. If you have an ARPA account, please tell CSTACY that he was successful; now let us see if my Pentagon friends can upset him. Or perhaps some reporter friends. Or both., Or even the House Armed Services Committee. It was widely known in the SF fandom community that Jerry Pournelle was an alcoholic during the 1980's, because he was always drunk, loud and and obnoxious at science fiction conventions, which a lot of MIT-AI lab members and turists attended and witnessed first-hand. http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Rec/rec.arts.sf.written/2008-01/msg06577.html http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Rec/rec.arts.sf.writ... I don't remember if the official MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy was written down at the time POURNE was flushed, of if he agreed to it and signed it like the rest of us tourists did, but it's pretty clear he violated it many times over: with his anti-social behavior and bad attitude; by taking took advantage of the MIT AI Lab for his profit making enterprise BYTE Magazine; by promoting his books on SF-LOVERS; by never hesitating to espouse his political beliefs; and by threaten to exploit his political connections for revenge. So flushing him was completely justified, regardless of his politics. https://medium.com/@donhopkins/mit-ai-lab-tourist-policy-f73b77075631 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/mit-ai-lab-tourist-policy-f73... >"A tourist sponsored by a laboratory member would generally receive some guidance and tutelage concerning acceptable behavior, proper design techniques for hardware and software, proper programming techniques, etc. The expectation on the laboratories' part was that a large percentage would become educated in the use of the advanced computing techniques developed and used in our laboratories and thereby greatly facilitate the technology transfer process. A second expectation was that some percentage would become interested and expert enough to contribute significantly to our research efforts." >"13. Any use of the MIT ITS machines for personal gain, profit making enterprise, or political purposes is not a legitimate use of the Laboratories' computer resources." >"14. These specific statements of policy give a minimum of how a tourist ought to behave to be a responsible user on the MIT ITS system. They are not a complete list of all the ways tourists should or should not behave. Just because some particular anti-social behavior is not listed does not mean that it is acceptable. What a tourist should do is cultivate a good attitude: make a positive effort to anticipate and avoid actions that would interfere with other users. If you cannot tell whether a certain course of action can interfere with any one, find out from someone else before trying it." "The man has learned nothing from his presence on MC and sets a bad example of what people might potentially accomplish there. I'd rather recycle his account for some bright 12-yr-old...)" -KMP When KMP said that, he could have been referring to good tourists like Rob Griffith: https://archive.org/details/getlamp-rgriffiths https://archive.org/details/getlamp-rgriffiths "I believe on one trip we were touring the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, and we saw some people gathered around this terminal. And we inquired what they were doing, and out of that came this game Zork, and my friend, since he was at MIT, had us get an account, and we were able to log in and figure out what to me looked like an extremely arcane set of commands to actually get this game running. From then on we were pretty much hooked from the first time we actually saw it. I believe we saw it when we were walking through the MIT AI Lab. I was a guest. Even back then there was some pretty amazing stuff in there. To see all these students and professors huddled around this terminal. What are the doing? They had all these incredibly cool Lisp Machines with big gorgeous displays, and a bunch of people were huddled around a machine that's got text. And we were sort of intrigued. I believe that was the first time I actually saw the game, so to speak. You know, I never got names, so I don't know. I was a petrified little 15-year-old kid walking around the MIT lab, so it was a bit of a feeling of "Am I supposed to be here?", and if I am supposed to be here, I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to talk, so perhaps I'll just be quiet and observe."
TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
Pournelle I always hated, because his column was soooo loooong and rambling, and it was inevitably an advertorial for some super-expensive not particularly interesting product he got for nothing and then received exemplary support for, usually directly from the CEO. And then, just as inevitably, there would be a prominent mention of his next and/or last books. Considering how much money Byte made from ads, I suspect Pournelle was incredibly well paid for his efforts - in addition to all that free hardware. Nice gig. Ciarcia was superb - back when many developers understood the hardware down to component level. So much cool and creative skill, month after month.

southern_cross 8y ago

One thing I liked about Jerry Pournelle was that whenever he reviewed something he usually gave a blow-by-blow description of all of the problems that he ran into and how he worked around them. Some folks gave him grief about this, but I could relate because I often ran into exactly the same problems that he did. Meanwhile other reviewers usually either glossed over this stuff or just ignored it completely, lest they offend the vendor or Microsoft or whoever. This gave unsuspecting users the impression that installing and running this stuff was a piece of cake, when in fact it could be a real nightmare.

analog31 8y ago

Ciarcia helped inspire my career. I was in high school, had learned programming, but was also interested in electronics, math, physics, etc. I got an internship at a computing center, where the work just seemed terribly boring. Of course one person's boredom is another person's excitement. But "programming with solder" was exactly the thing that pulled it all together for me.

chadcmulligan 8y ago

Was that the 8052-AH Basic one? (Funny I still remember the numbers). I worked for a place where I built a commercial system using that. We used it for a couple of things, a nurse call system, a datalogger, just GP IO, was a great time.

MegaDeKay 8y ago
Exactly. And it is still out there if you want to download it (and the source!), burn an EPROM, and relive some memories. The code, along with some cool hardware designs, can be found here:. http://www.dos4ever.com/8031board/8031board.html#dialects http://www.dos4ever.com/8031board/8031board.html#dialects

DonHopkins 8y ago

Absolutely: Steve Ciarcia is a true god! http://circuitcellar.com/how-it-all-began/ http://circuitcellar.com/how-it-all-began/ On the other hand, Jerry Pournelle was notorious for threatening companies with bad reviews (and carrying out his threats) if they didn't give him free products. So in that sense, he was a pioneer in the field of Entitlement Blogging. https://www.facebook.com/WhiteMooseCafe/posts/2049013308712608 https://www.facebook.com/WhiteMooseCafe/posts/20490133087126... >The sense of entitlement is just too strong in the blogging community and the nastiness, hissy fits and general hate displayed after one of your members was not granted her request for a freebie is giving your whole industry a bad name. I never thought we would be inundated with negative reviews for the simple reason that somebody was required to pay for goods received or services rendered. Not only did he feel entitled to free (as in LOTS OF beer) hardware and software, but also to free ARPANET access, which he bragged about in Chaos Manor. And then he would make incoherent drunken accusations and threats in public to his benevolent benefactors at MIT, who finally got sick of him and flushed him. "How Jerry Pournelle got kicked off the ARPANET": http://www.stormtiger.org/bob/humor/pournell/story.html http://www.stormtiger.org/bob/humor/pournell/story.html He was so far ahead of his time, he would be working for the Trump administration if he were younger. They would have loved his enthusiasm for social darwinism. "Think of it as evolution in action." -POURNE https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/trump-is-the-candidate-2/ https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/trump-is-the-candi... "So what do I do? I agree with nearly everything he is for, but I’m better qualified to make it happen. I avoid some issues, but I go for his most popular ones and say, yeah! Want that! And I can make it happen better than he can. I’ve got the experience of working in government, but I’m not the establishment any more than Mr. Trump is. Heck, I’ll offer him a cabinet post. I could use his energy in my administration." -POURNE http://voxday.blogspot.nl/2016/04/jerry-pournelle-on-donald-trump.html http://voxday.blogspot.nl/2016/04/jerry-pournelle-on-donald-... "But he has never wavered on his desire to fill the Supreme Court with Justices as near in scholarship and view to Scalia as possible; that alone would be enough to get me to the polls for Trump if he’s nominated." -POURNE "One thing that is known about ARPA: you can be heaved off it for supporting the policies of the Department of Defense. Of course that was intended to anger me. If you have an ARPA account, please tell CSTACY that he was successful; now let us see if my Pentagon friends can upset him. Or perhaps some reporter friends. Or both., Or even the House Armed Services Committee." -POURNE The real reason POURNE was so unpopular with the people running the MIT-AI Lab during the 1980's had to do with the fact that he was a belligerent alcoholic who acted entitled to the free computer services and expert advice that he was taking for granted and criticizing, rather than his politics. In spite of the fact that many of those people who he accused of being "communists" went far out of their way to spend their precious time patiently answering his questions, tutoring and helping him (RMS even personally wrote some free software for him at his request -- how communist is that??!): https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reviews/bookmonth.html https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reviews/bookmonth.html >"I first met Richard Stallman (he called himself RMS in those days) when he was a graduate student at MIT and I was just learning about the ARPANET. He was immensely helpful to me in those days, patiently showing me things about emacs — his full-screen editor that he wrote in TECO, and the less said about TECO the better — as well as adding some special code to take care of things I wanted to accomplish. I learned then that RMS and I have a common failing: We don't suffer fools gladly or indeed at all, and we are sometimes wrong about who is a fool. But that's another story for another time." But POURNE certainly threatened to use his political connections as a weapon against them. POURNE is the one who made his own politics an issue, who told John McCarthy (the computer scientist, not Joseph the commie witch hunter) that he thought MIT was run by a bunch of communists, and who posted ranting threats on BIX. Just read the sputtering mis-punctuated threatening screed he posted to BIX, and decide for yourself if you think he was drunk, or if he just acted that way all the time purely because of his political beliefs: One thing that is known about ARPA: you can be heaved off it for supporting the policies of the Department of Defense. Of course that was intended to anger me. If you have an ARPA account, please tell CSTACY that he was successful; now let us see if my Pentagon friends can upset him. Or perhaps some reporter friends. Or both., Or even the House Armed Services Committee. It was widely known in the SF fandom community that Jerry Pournelle was an alcoholic during the 1980's, because he was always drunk, loud and and obnoxious at science fiction conventions, which a lot of MIT-AI lab members and turists attended and witnessed first-hand. http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Rec/rec.arts.sf.written/2008-01/msg06577.html http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Rec/rec.arts.sf.writ... I don't remember if the official MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy was written down at the time POURNE was flushed, of if he agreed to it and signed it like the rest of us tourists did, but it's pretty clear he violated it many times over: with his anti-social behavior and bad attitude; by taking took advantage of the MIT AI Lab for his profit making enterprise BYTE Magazine; by promoting his books on SF-LOVERS; by never hesitating to espouse his political beliefs; and by threaten to exploit his political connections for revenge. So flushing him was completely justified, regardless of his politics. https://medium.com/@donhopkins/mit-ai-lab-tourist-policy-f73b77075631 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/mit-ai-lab-tourist-policy-f73... >"A tourist sponsored by a laboratory member would generally receive some guidance and tutelage concerning acceptable behavior, proper design techniques for hardware and software, proper programming techniques, etc. The expectation on the laboratories' part was that a large percentage would become educated in the use of the advanced computing techniques developed and used in our laboratories and thereby greatly facilitate the technology transfer process. A second expectation was that some percentage would become interested and expert enough to contribute significantly to our research efforts." >"13. Any use of the MIT ITS machines for personal gain, profit making enterprise, or political purposes is not a legitimate use of the Laboratories' computer resources." >"14. These specific statements of policy give a minimum of how a tourist ought to behave to be a responsible user on the MIT ITS system. They are not a complete list of all the ways tourists should or should not behave. Just because some particular anti-social behavior is not listed does not mean that it is acceptable. What a tourist should do is cultivate a good attitude: make a positive effort to anticipate and avoid actions that would interfere with other users. If you cannot tell whether a certain course of action can interfere with any one, find out from someone else before trying it." "The man has learned nothing from his presence on MC and sets a bad example of what people might potentially accomplish there. I'd rather recycle his account for some bright 12-yr-old...)" -KMP When KMP said that, he could have been referring to good tourists like Rob Griffith: https://archive.org/details/getlamp-rgriffiths https://archive.org/details/getlamp-rgriffiths "I believe on one trip we were touring the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, and we saw some people gathered around this terminal. And we inquired what they were doing, and out of that came this game Zork, and my friend, since he was at MIT, had us get an account, and we were able to log in and figure out what to me looked like an extremely arcane set of commands to actually get this game running. From then on we were pretty much hooked from the first time we actually saw it. I believe we saw it when we were walking through the MIT AI Lab. I was a guest. Even back then there was some pretty amazing stuff in there. To see all these students and professors huddled around this terminal. What are the doing? They had all these incredibly cool Lisp Machines with big gorgeous displays, and a bunch of people were huddled around a machine that's got text. And we were sort of intrigued. I believe that was the first time I actually saw the game, so to speak. You know, I never got names, so I don't know. I was a petrified little 15-year-old kid walking around the MIT lab, so it was a bit of a feeling of "Am I supposed to be here?", and if I am supposed to be here, I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to talk, so perhaps I'll just be quiet and observe."

TheOtherHobbes 8y ago

Pournelle I always hated, because his column was soooo loooong and rambling, and it was inevitably an advertorial for some super-expensive not particularly interesting product he got for nothing and then received exemplary support for, usually directly from the CEO. And then, just as inevitably, there would be a prominent mention of his next and/or last books. Considering how much money Byte made from ads, I suspect Pournelle was incredibly well paid for his efforts - in addition to all that free hardware. Nice gig. Ciarcia was superb - back when many developers understood the hardware down to component level. So much cool and creative skill, month after month.