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I loved Jerry Pournelle’s “Chaos Manor” columns, and Steve Ciarcia’s “Circuit Cellar” — it was nice to have both software and hardware represented. The articles
by amacbride 4y ago
I loved Jerry Pournelle’s “Chaos Manor” columns, and Steve Ciarcia’s “Circuit Cellar” — it was nice to have both software and hardware represented. The articles on the Inmos Transputer were fascinating, and sparked my interest in parallel and distributed computing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer
- fastaguy88 4y agoJerry Pournelle's column was very entertaining and well written, but it taught me an important lesson. I knew something about the computers of the day (perhaps more than Pournelle), and I often found him giving bizarre, if not incorrect, advice (and sometimes, when he had a problem, he would just call his bud Bill Gates). Reading the column, it was clear he was the expert, even when he was not. So I learned that it is important to distinguish between good writing as entertainment, and good writing as expertise.
- PacoLinux 4y agoand some sent by vendors for review, at his home office. Because Pournelle was then, according to the magazine, "virtually Byte's only writer who was a mere user—he didn't create compilers and computers, he merely used them," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle
- ghaff 4y agoPC Magazine was almost certainly more routinely useful to me than Byte. But Byte had this old-schooly eclectic vibe to it.