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We've lost a great author, a visionary who brought a little light in a darkening world.

Sad to hear that. I enjoyed many of his novels (especially the Ringworld series), and also remember reading his column in Byte.

Edit: Sh*t. Ringworld was Niven, not Pournelle. Pournelle collaborated with Niven on a bunch of other projects (many of which I've read) though, hence my brain fart. Mote in God's Eye, Lucifer's Hammer, and Legacy of Heorot were great.

That's understandable, I tend to confuse them also as they did their most memorable work together. Such as the Motie series, which for me is the best alien contact storyline ever. Pournelle was the rare irreligious fellow who readily listened to reason and hardly condemned anyone outright.

I didnt know anything about him, until I heard he passed on the TWIT podcast, where they played back short clips of his interviews; he was fun an funny to listen to
https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech ... tart=false


I then did more reading on him.

He was the first author to write a novel on a computer.

He did this on his PC named "Ezekial", whom he called his old friend who happened to be a Z-80, ran at 1 MHZ, featured 2 64-Kilobyte 8” floppy disks, and 64 Kilobytes of memory.
He pulled the Z-80 out of storage, and revived it at the request of the Smithsonian Museum. The Smithsonian only wanted him for a display as the first computer to have been used to write a science fiction novel, For years he was in the hall of communications and computers, next to an old Imsai 8080.
"For several years I used to say to people How many people have you met who have their personal computer on display at the Smithsonian? In future the answer will be all of them.”

Source:
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosman ... rocessing/

RIP Jerry. I read quite a bit of his work, including aforementioned co-works with Larry Niven. Good sci fi.

On a side-note, allow me to unburden myself (and I'm sorry for the political aside) by saying I find it reprehensible that certain people online are commenting in article comment sections along the lines of "but he was a conservative".

And let's leave the R&P right there.

That's too bad, I really liked the guy for a number of reasons.

Yeah I read many of his novels when I was younger. One of my favorites.

RIP among the stars

I've enjoyed his books since the early 80's and especially his comments about his own computer equipment. I had a subscription to BYTE Magazine and always read his column 'Chaos Manor'.

Mr Bill wrote:

I've enjoyed his books since the early 80's and especially his comments about his own computer equipment. I had a subscription to BYTE Magazine and always read his column 'Chaos Manor'.

Yeah, I enjoyed his "Chaos Manor" column (probably the "go to" column I read 1st in BYTE Magazine, which was a great deal in the 1990's. I had a six-year subscription, running from 1993 to end of 1999. Unfortunately, they got bought out by someone in 1998 (i think) and I was offered 2 one year subscriptions to something much less read...

On a separate note,
BYTE magazine always seemed to have the best articles on hardware and numerous OSes; especially Object-oriented OSes that were all the rage like GEOS, BeOS, OS/2 and NeXTSTEP. My personal favorite Object based OS we used to use at work was OS/400, later to become i5/OS and now IBM i, but that ended in the early 2000s as we migrated to Microsoft.

Chaos Manor was the goto article for me in Byte as well. Jerry will be missed!

freebird wrote:

Mr Bill wrote:

I've enjoyed his books since the early 80's and especially his comments about his own computer equipment. I had a subscription to BYTE Magazine and always read his column 'Chaos Manor'.

Yeah, I enjoyed his "Chaos Manor" column (probably the "go to" column I read 1st in BYTE Magazine, which was a great deal in the 1990's. I had a six-year subscription, running from 1993 to end of 1999. Unfortunately, they got bought out by someone in 1998 (i think) and I was offered 2 one year subscriptions to something much less read...

On a separate note,
BYTE magazine always seemed to have the best articles on hardware and numerous OSes; especially Object-oriented OSes that were all the rage like GEOS, BeOS, OS/2 and NeXTSTEP. My personal favorite Object based OS we used to use at work was OS/400, later to become i5/OS and now IBM i, but that ended in the early 2000s as we migrated to Microsoft.

You missed out on the best years of Byte - during the early to late '80s. It became a shell of its former self after that period when it became nothing more than another lame PC magazine. In its heyday the technical articles on new computer systems, RISC microprocessors, new operating systems etc was inspiring to a teenage geek. Steve Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar was an inspiration in my becoming an electronics engineer designing embedded systems (once upon a time - now a Java developer). Pournelle? Not so much. A lightweight which I barely tolerated - hardly worthy to be in a tech-heavy journal. Some of his sci-fi was ok though.