Daniel Spisak on Technology

Some of you may know that I do a fair amount of computer related journalism with Jerry Pournelle who has had a column called “Computing at Chaos Manor” which I help out with fairly regularly. Well as of July CMP, the entity that owns BYTE and publishes it at www.byte.com, has more or less decided to end the publication by not renewing contracts with Jerry or my colleague David Em of the BYTE Media Labs. Below is a letter Jerry has sent out to people to announce the new home of the Computing at Chaos Manor column, Chaos Manor Reviews:

Chaos Manor Reviews now has the column Computing at Chaos Manor; and in future will have David Em’s brilliant commentary on the visual arts. My current July Column Part One (of four) is posted now; there will be a new installment next week.

I am no longer sending columns to BYTE because the CMP management did not renew the contract, and the subsequent offer was considerably less than half what I had been getting. I will let David tell his own story of why his columns will no longer be at BYTE. Note that BYTE owns the non-exclusive right to publish the back issue columns they have bought. I also have publication rights to those columns, as David does to his. BYTE will no longer have new material from either of us.

I did not go looking for another publisher in part because the column has always been at BYTE, and in part because it’s probably time for me to stop thinking of myself as a journalist who writes science fact and fiction, and start thinking of myself as a science fiction writer who had a lot of fun and negative advertising costs writing computer columns.

Computing at Chaos Manor was the longest running computer column in any publication, and very nearly the longest running column in any venue. I turned in from 5 to 14 thousand words every month, and never missed a deadline by more than a day or so. I filed columns from Europe — once, from Liechtenstein, by printing it on a Tandy 2″ thermal tape and having it delivered by Emerson, there being no connection between Liechtenstein and Peterborough. I filed from Tokyo, and from north of the Arctic Circle. During the 3 months when BYTE didn’t exist — this is after CMP bought BYTE from McGraw Hill, then suddenly closed it, and before they opened BYTE.COM — I wrote the column and filed it here. During that time I continued to send the columns to the overseas publications.

That generated www.jerrypournelle.com which I kept going after BYTE.COM began because we had enough subscriptions to make it worthwhile.

I’ve started Chaos Manor Reviews because I hate to give up the continuity. On the other hand, the column will not have the priority in my life that it used to have. And on the gripping hand, I’ll need to double the subscriptions to keep it going at all.

That’s hardly your concern since everyone getting this message is paid up to date (except for a small number of personal subscriptions I send to friends). Of course if you want to go recruit a subscriber or two I won’t object. You can certainly spread the word that Computing at Chaos Manor is alive and well at www.chaosmanorreviews.com .

For the moment we are running Chaos Manor Reviews precisely as we run the general web site: that is, on the Public Radio model. It’s all available, and subscriptions are voluntary.

That will likely change when we have more content in the Reviews site.

We plan to have all my back columns, and all of David’s, at Chaos Manor Reviews. If the site is a success we will have a good mailbag each week. We will have short reviews by Alex Pournelle. We’ll have comments by my associates. I don’t name them because I’ll let them decide how much they want to contribute under their own names. I do believe my “kitchen cabinet” of advisors is the best editorial group I have encountered since the glory days when BYTE had 34 first class editors, most of them in Peterborough. Between my advisors and my readership I do not think there is any place on Earth where one can get better and more accurate views and opinions about small computers and SOHO computing and networking.

Eventually we will be sending you user names (probably your own email address that you subscribed with) and passwords for access to closed areas of Chaos Manor Reviews. In those areas we will have the latest columns and material; we’ll move that out in the open after, say, three months.

We may also allow unobtrusive advertising, but I will wait for your advice on that.

I’ll try to spare you, the current subscribers, from any new circulation drives and appeals. I would appreciate it if you’d get the word out.

And thanks to all of you for your support. Neither www.jerrypournelle.com nor www.chaosmanorreviews.com would exist without you.

Jerry Pournelle
Chaos Manor

I myself plan to start contributing to the Chaos Manor Reviews site as I have somewhat of a vested interest in seeing that succeed in addition to having a very deep interest in technology/computer journalism all things being equal. If you have never read the Chaos Manor columns before I recommend you check them out as we get them up on the Chaos Manor Reviews site as I think they are very accessible for a wide variety of people.