View 707 Wednesday, December 28, 2011

The house has been filled with workmen again, and Niven came over with some contracts for the Chinese translation rights to MOTE and HAMMER. Fairly decent payments for five years worth of translation rights to old books. Print is still worth something.

Once Niven was here the dog made certain that workmen or not, we were going to take a hike. She likes Larry. She’s also insistent. We set out with a goal of going about halfway up, but we got to talking, and there were lots of gophers, and it was a very pleasant day. The upshot was that we went all the way up to the summit, 2 miles and 700 feet elevation, and by the time we got there we had a new character, a better story line, and a pretty complete reshaping of the book. It’s going to be a humdinger. Maybe it will be around and worth something forty years from now.

We continued the discussion and notes over lunch, and I pretty well exhausted myself physically and mentally. I have a lot of fiction work to do. Things may be a bit thinner here for a while as I work on this. I know where we have to go, and it’s time to get us there.

I have chosen some mail comments which I include here because I haven’t time to write my own essays on the subjects, and I think they are important topics that need consideration.

For amusement you may want to look at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/12/15/climategate_police_action/ . In particular, play the video; it’s both amusing and chilling.

Thanks to Tracy.

Subject: The green police are taking it to a new level:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/12/15/climategate_police_action/

Tracy

Brain-Eating Amoeba Fatalities Linked to Neti Pots

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/12/19/brain-eating-amoeba-fatalities-linked-to-common-cold-remedy/

I seem to recall you recommending a high-tech version of this device.

—

Tim of Angle

I do use a nasal pump, and I have always used Los Angeles tap water out of the hot water tap, along with the powder that comes with the pump. The brand I use is Grossan, and at one time I had a link to their site, but they seem to have changed hands or something. It’s easy to find if you’re looking. I always clean the system before and after use, but I have taken no other precautions. Those who live in water districts that might allow amoeba to infest the tap water, or those who draw their own water from wells or cisterns, should be more cautious and probably boil hell out of the water before using it, or use some other source of water. Injecting amoeba into ones sinuses is not likely to have a good outcome.

On the other hand, I have been using the Grossan nasal pump and their powder for more than a decade, and they have proved to be the best way I know to deal with pollens, allergies, and other sinus problems. My experiences have been entirely positive, and I’d hate to be deprived of the system. Prior to getting the Grossan pump I tried a number of things in desperation, including “Fresh Snake Biles” in a rather evil smelling concoction I would not recommend to anyone else. The “Snake Biles” actually worked, but nowhere near as well as the Grossan, and I haven’t been tempted to try to find any more Snake Biles.

Clearly I won’t be responsible for anything that happens to a reader who tries a nasal pump. I’m not a physician. I can only say that my experiences, using Los Angeles tap water from the hot water tap have been positive and pleasant with what I consider a good outcome and this has been the case for a decade.

Spengler > Civil War as the Second-Best Option

Jerry

Spengler is at it again. He takes Voltaire’s saying that the best is the enemy of the good and examines the current Middle East with an eye to what is good for the U.S. He says civil war is the second-best option, and is therefore better than some other outcomes:

http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2011/12/23/civil-war-as-the-second-best-option/?singlepage=true

“The best has been the enemy of the good throughout. Pursuing the fantasy of a “best” option — stable and democratic Muslim states — has cost us too much blood and treasure, and above all, far too much in terms of the morale of the American public. . . . I warned in April 2008 that: “it was illusory to believe that the US was capable of creating a stable to regime to replace [Saddam]. To prevail in the regime meant an unending series of small interventions and unending chaos in the region, with hideous humanitarian consequences. Cardinal Richelieu had the stomach to pursue such a policy towards the German empire during the Thirty Years’ War of 1618-1648, but not Bush. Yet a Richelovian policy towards the Middle East, horrible as it would be, is the inevitable consequence of American interventionism.” [end of embedded quote]

“Americans are not cold enough to initiate a Richelovian campaign of destabilization. But whether we like it or not, a general destabilization has overwhelmed North Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Central Asia. We did not seek it. We did our best to prevent it. Our hands are clean. Unlike the Reagan administration, which did its best to prolong the Iran-Iraq War with its million casualties, the Bush administration tried to avoid such conflicts. Now that we are stuck with humanitarian catastrophes of biblical proportions, we had better make the best use of them. Never let a crisis go to waste, as somebody said during his 15 minutes of fame.”

<snip> “The analogies to be drawn between America’s strategic situation today and the Peloponnesian War are few; those with the Thirty Years War, much closer to our own times, are strong. It is dreary stuff; there is no-one to root for, no white hats or black hats, just a mass of misdeeds that killed off about two-fifths of the people of Central Europe between 1618 and 1648.”

He finishes with: “Like it or not, circumstances will force us to think this way. Might as well get a head start.”

Ed

The question is, what are our international obligations? Are we to be involved in territorial disputes in the Middle East (or in Eastern Europe? Caucuses? How did the American people get saddled with such obligations.

The only acceptable answer, at least to me, would be that the American interest is best served by our interventions; an international rescure, it would seem to me, should be subject to a Congressional resolution. But then I have been against all our interventions since the Cold War ended. I think both the United States and the world would be far better off had we invested the $Trillions our wars have cost in the development of American energy sources and energy independence. Had we declared war on energy shortages we would long ago have won that war, and we would not be in such crushing debt. But then I said that prior to our interventions.

I have great admiration and regard for our military, who have performed well and efficiently while suffering from a lack of mission definition; but had they been put to work drilling oil wells and building Space Solar Power Satellites we’d be a lot better off, and while such developments always cost lives, I expect there would not have been thousands.

We are the friends of Liberty everywhere. We are the guardians only of our own. I see no need for a policy different from that, but I am willing to have it debated. Perhaps we ought to intervene to prevent genocides, but our record in that regard is not so great. We stopped the slaughter of Albanians in Serbia by giving part of Serbia to the Albanians; the result has been the genocide of the Serbs in that area. It is not clear that this was in the US national interest. Perhaps it was a moral triumph although neither the Serbs nor the Russians believe so, and the people of the Lower Danube have not really recovered from the economic damages we inflicted on the area. As to Iraq, the story there is not over: I hear little from the Kurdish region of Iraq. I think that silence will not continue. We have withdrawn from Iraq; we are not loved there; and we have left behind auxiliaries who helped us and to whom we have an unfulfilled moral obligation. Civil War between the Sunni and the Shiites in Iraq is not improbable. Iranian intervention is not unlikely.

We did go abroad seeking dragons to slay. There have been consequences. There will be more.

The below is from a friend of mine and contains information I believe of importance to you and our country. You can find out more about Dr. Kupper at his website: http://chinaresourcesgroup.com/about.html

Cheap energy = prosperity!

Drill here, DRILL NOW!

David Couvillon

Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de Hot Dog Excellance; Avoider of Yard Work

Subject: Harbinger of the Near Future

For anyone watching the events unfold in the world economic arena for the past two years, it is has been obvious that China has become extremely concerned regarding the devaluation of the U.S. dollar under the policies of the Obama administration. This includes, most notably, not only our massive foreign debt, but the policies of the Fed and Treasury in just printing increased amounts of paper money to put into circulation. It is a classic case of the debasement of the U.S. currency. Consequently, China has increasingly lost faith in the value of the U.S. dollar, both short term and long term, to serve as the defacto currency for world trade. When China suggested, last year, that a new currency be created for world trade, preferably through the IMF, this idea was quickly shot down by the U.S. and Europe.

The response of China would naturally be to either replace the U.S. Dollar with the Chinese Yuan or to make the Chinese Yuan a currency equal to the Dollar as the vehicle for foreign trade. About two years ago, China began, on a limited basis, to utilize the Yuan as the basis for trade with selected countries in Southeast Asia. Following the typical and rational Chinese approach, they experimented with this for the past couple of years and found that using the Yuan as the basis settlement of trade between China and these select countries was working quite well. Now, in what I consider to be a major step forward, and one which seems not understood or appreciated for its significance, the Chinese have expanded this to the their trade relationships with Japan. In this morning’s report on CNN, in the discussion of the meeting between the Japanese Prime Minister and President Hu Jintao of China, the following sentence appeared, buried in the overall story of discussing Japan’s desire for China to control North Korea.

“Both sides also signed energy conservation and environmental protection agreements, along with an announcement that the two sides will use their own currencies in bilateral trade rather than U.S. dollars in an effort to encourage economic cooperation”

This now means that trade between the world’s second and third largest economies will now occur using the Chinese Yuan and the Japanese Yen, and not the U.S. Dollar. The Chinese Yuan is becoming the currency for trade in Asia. Probably in another 2-3 years, the Chinese Yuan will become a freely convertible international currency and come to dominate trade not only with Asia, but with Europe. The age of the U.S. Dollar as being the predominant world currency has now begun to become a memory. True, it will take several more years for the figures to be revealed and reported in world currency markets, etc., but with this announcement between the second and third largest economies in the world, the roadmap is quite clear for the future.

And with all of the occurring, we proceed in our own ignorance to have Presidential primaries where the debates remain centered around religious values, abortion rights, divorces, and a host of extraneous issues. In our own ignorance, we continue down the failed road of European socialism and have become a nation of entitlements and cheap currency. There is a dearth of leadership in our nation, and the fault lies with both political parties.

= = = = =

School Lunches in Los Angeles

Jerry:

In light of recent items you posted regarding the new lunch program put together by the LAUSD, here’s a link to Megan McArdle’s comments on why, despite a very successful pilot program, the lunch program is a miserable failure.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/why-pilot-projects-fail/250364/

Among her remarks:

* This is one more installment in a continuing series, brought to you by the universe, entitled "promising pilot projects often don’t scale <http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/01/the-value-of-health-care-experiments/70106/> ".

* Sometims the "success" of the earlier project was simply a result of random chance, or what researchers call the Hawthorne Effect.

* Sometimes the success was due to what you might call a "hidden parameter", something that researchers don’t realize is affecting their test.

* Sometimes the success was due to the high quality, fully committed staff.

* Sometimes the program becomes unmanageable as it gets larger.

* Sometimes the results are survivor bias.

"So consider the LAUSD test. In the testing phase, when the program was small, they were probably working with a small group of schools which had been specially chosen to participate. They did not have a sprawling supply chain to manage. The kids and the workers knew they were being studied. And they were asking the kids which food they liked–a question which, social science researchers will tell you, is highly likely to elicit the answer that they liked something.

That is very different from choosing to eat it in a cafeteria when no one’s looking. And producing the food is also very different. Cooking palatable food in large amounts is hard, particularly when you don’t have an enormous budget–and the things that make us fat are, by and large, also the things that are palatable when mass-produced. Bleached grains and processed fats have a much longer shelf life than fresh produce, and can take a hell of a lot more handling. Salt and sugar are delicious, but they are also preservatives that, among other things, disguise the flavor of stale food.

I think one anecdote in the article is particularly telling. People complained that salads dated October 7th were served on the 17th–and the district responded by first, pointing out that that was the "best served by" date, not the date when the food actually went bad; and second, removing the labels because they were "confusing". Now, as anyone who has forgotten to eat a bag of lettuce knows, while it may not actually be rotten after 10 days, it probably doesn’t look much like something you’d eat voluntarily. This is not something that you can change by stamping a different "sell by" date on the container. If that were my choice, I too would come to school with a backup bag of Cheetos."

It’s worth reading the whole thing. And maybe follow it up with some readings on systemantics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics

………….Karl

View 707 Tuesday, December 27, 2011

I am weary of saying that I am not an apologist for Newt Gingrich, then writing as if I am; but the headlines give me little choice. I have long said that Newt would not have been my first choice for President, but he is an old friend, and he would be a far better President than our current one. The nomination ought to be based on rational discussion, not on headline gotchas. There is a sense in which the future of the Republic depends on this principle. The Internet Age followed rapidly on the TV age which followed the Radio Age, and all of those had enormous effects on the way we choose our national leaders. Now we have Facebook and Twitter, and instant polls, and what gets lost in all this is any rational discussion of issues.

As for example the Wall Street Journal front page headline” Gingrich Applauded Romney’s Health Plan” (link) which begins “Newt Gingrich voiced enthusiasm for Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health-care law when it was passed five years ago, the same plan he has been denouncing over the past few months as he campaigned for the Republican presidential nomination.”

Way down in the page 4 continuation it says

At the same time, the essay cautioned that the Massachusetts plan may not work. It warned that the state has an "exhaustive" list of health-coverage requirements that prohibit insurers from offering basic plans with high deductibles. It predicted that state residents earning little more than $30,000 a year—the threshold for an individual to qualify for subsidized coverage—would be "in jeopardy of being priced out of the system." Instead, the newsletter said, "we propose that a more realistic approach might be to limit the mandate to those individuals earning upward of $54,000 per year."

It also gave a nod to the concept of making it easier for Americans to purchase insurance across state lines, an idea widely backed by Republicans as a mechanism to make coverage cheaper through competition.

A follow-up August 2006 newsletter from the center called Mr. Romney’s plan "the most interesting effort to solve the uninsured problem in America today." It praised "a Republican governor working with a Democratic state legislature to find a bipartisan reform that is based on market-oriented principles." (link)

The entire article comes closer to a rational presentation, but the entire front page is not. Nor, despite the argumentation posing as a front page news article, is it clear that Mr. Gingrich’s position on the Romney plan for Massachusetts is not consistent with principled conservatism. I would have thought that the notion of state’s rights and allowing the states to experiment with solutions to very sticky problems was almost the essence of the Constitution of 1787.

Certainly the conservative position on health care is that it is not a national “problem” to be “solved” by national action. Whether or not any government actions can “solve” whatever is meant by the problem of health insurance, I for one am glad of the Massachusetts experiment. Like X projects in aerospace, it is an experiment that gives us some data rather than models and theory; and I cannot think that Gingrich’s “approval” of the Romney plan is somehow indicative of any betrayal of conservative principles. If some kind of universal health insurance program is going to work anywhere, it should work in Mass., a wealthy and highly educated state able to afford it if anyone could.

Any discussion of conservative principles and health care has to begin with some facts. One of those facts is that the courts have in essence nationalized a form of universal health care: they have decreed that emergency rooms cannot turn people away for lack of insurance or other means to pay for the treatment they demand. Moreover, there is, I think, a general consensus among the American People that the spirit of this mandate is acceptable: people should not die in hospital waiting rooms while trying to prove they can pay. Of course that seldom happens, and often the treatment demanded is not urgently needed, but we are agreed that people ought not be denied emergency care.

That simple principle works with some populations with strong moral and ethical principles that include limits on what they think they are entitled to. It works in many American communities to this day. It may work in Massachusetts for all I know. It does not work in Southern California, where eleven hospitals have closed their emergency rooms, and the once world class trauma center network we had is nearly forgotten. The hospitals close their emergency rooms because they can’t afford to keep them open: the alternative would be to close the whole hospital. (Another alternative, triage in the waiting room doesn’t work and subjects the hospitals to crippling law suits. The Courts in essence won’t permit it.)

And that is the essence of the “health insurance problem.” Insurance is not welfare, and requiring equal premiums for all insured – granting the ‘right’ to insurance for those with pre-conditions at the same premium as those in good health – is not insurance at all. The obvious strategy for those with crippling pre-conditions is to buy the insurance, while for those in good health it makes sense to buy no insurance at all until symptoms appear, then rush out and buy it. Given that rational economic strategy of the customers, the obvious rational strategy of insurance companies is to declare bankruptcy, and for their executives to get into some other line of work, possibly as welfare administrators.

As Mitt Romney has repeatedly said, in Massachusetts they had about 8% population without health insurance. Everyone else was satisfied with what they had. The plan, which was passed by a Democratic Party controlled legislature, attempted to deal with that situation and provide for the 8%. In theory it wouldn’t affect anyone else. How well it works is worthy of study, but it is the business of the people of Massachusetts, not mine. In Los Angeles County we have had eleven emergency rooms close down, considerable stress on those remaining, and the loss of our once renowned Trauma Network. I don’t know what the situation is in Boston. Were I in the health care business I would pay more attention.

The real question is, who is obliged to pay for what? If an elderly uninsured person has a heart attack and requires emergency care, who is obliged to pay for it? What is my personal obligation? And for that matter, if I have a heart attack, should you pay for it? (I will quickly acknowledge that when I did have medical problems, I had no lack of free expert advice from readers and subscribers, for which I am extremely grateful; but I think that is a different matter. None of that was compelled.)

That is really the essence of it all: who should be compelled to pay? Should the physicians and technicians be compelled to render their services for free? That seems unfair. It is also unlikely to produce a good supply of highly educated and qualified physicians, nurses, and technicians. And yes: I do understand that the supply has in the past been artificially limited (or at least that this is contended) in order to keep the price of those services artificially high, so the compulsion is not so monstrous as it seems – but that leads off to another question about who is compelled to pay for medical and technical training, the costs of such education, and the monstrous quality of the school system. And we haven’t time to deal with that.

We don’t even have time to deal with the question of “who must be compelled to pay and for what?” – yet that is the essence of the “health insurance” problem. When I was young the matter was simple enough. You paid for your own medical services, and if that proved to be beyond your means you sold property, or borrowed money, or did whatever was required; or you didn’t pay and the doctors gave you what service they thought you might deserve of their charity. There wasn’t much medical insurance as such. There were charity hospitals, mostly run by Christian religious organizations.

Health Insurance became widespread largely because it was a way for employers to compete for good workers during a labor shortage in a time of wage controls: the business could deduct the insurance payments as a cost of doing business, while the insurance benefit was not taxed as income for the laborer. The result was widespread insurance among the employed, and that led to the situation of establishing one’s insurance status when being admitted to hospital – and that led to the horror stories of people dying in the waiting room while filling out forms. And that made health insurance a political problem.

But the political problem never really addressed the question: Who must pay for what? What are you obligated to pay for my health problems?

Once we establish that principle we can look at mechanisms for dealing with it; and having a cold look at this first principle should once and for all establish a simple fact: it is not a federal problem. It may be a state problem: Massachusetts chose to make it one for the people of that state. That will depend on the ethical and moral principles of the people of that state: and given the relentless war on religion, that may be an interesting picture. Perhaps the answer is simple: a relentless drive for entitlement to the masses at the expense of the productive. This has happened before through history. The Framers of our Constitution hoped to avoid this at least on a national level by limiting the power of the federal government: but leaving matters to the states means that states will approach such matters in different ways.

I have no definitive answers here, but it does seem to me that before we talk about the mechanisms of “solving the health insurance problem” we deal with the more fundamental question: “who must pay for someone else’s health care?” and on what moral or ethical principle is that obligation based. Until this is answered we have only the simple principle of “democracy”: You have it, and we want it. Republics fall when that becomes the basis of government, and the rich turn to a protector, usually a ‘friend of the people”. The result is seldom to anyone’s liking, as we say with the Soviet experiments.

Of course that kind of democracy usually does produce a ruling class.

I do understand that politics takes over from rational discussion. When that happens the trumpets of leadership become uncertain. The personality substituting for Rush Limbaugh, for example, is today in near despair, while desperately proclaiming Newt Gingrich a liar for his comments on Romney’s Massachusetts health care. After all, didn’t he approve it? But it’s a bit more complex than that. Newt is wrong to impute to Romney a desire to impose the Massachusetts plan on the nation. I don’t recall Romney ever wanting to do so. He has, correctly, defended the state’s right to the experiment.

Newt is correct in denouncing Obamacare and saying that the Massachusetts plan must not be imposed on the United States. He was correct when he said it was an interesting experiment. He is playing politics when he attributes to Romney a desire to impose this on the nation. I certainly would not have advised him to do that. I will say that Mr. Gingrich has been far less negative in his campaigning than his Republican establishment enemies have been.

Newt thinks a lot and he says what he thinks. It was true when I was associated with him and it is true now. He generally surrounds himself with smart people who are not afraid to tell him he’s wrong, and he tends to enjoy those discussions. This is a very good practice for a legislator. It is less so for a commander in chief, but it is not a fatal flaw for a president. The President of the United States is not the Emperor. His whimsical decrees do not have immediate effect. The most important requirement for President is a dedication to the Constitution. That, I think, applies to every one of the Republican candidates.

Reagan once told us as a general rule to nominate the most conservative electable candidate. That was good advice then and it still is.

View 707 Monday, December 26, 2011

Happy New Year.

A professor in Maryland has an article in the New York Times about word processors and novelist. He doesn’t seem to have done any homework at all. He references a 1985 Stephen King preface, and is apparently intent on digging about in the Microsoft archives, but he hasn’t bothered to talk to the people who were actually writing with computers in the 1979-1984 era. It took mo no time at all to Google up “LORD OF CHAOS MANOR : Hoping for a message from a long-lost friend” from the Los Angeles Times, and it was a quite late development. The LA Times article even mentions the 1982 novel Oath of Fealty, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, which was a New York Times bestseller and for a while was on the list of the best 100 science fiction novels of all time. Considering that it was written in the dawn of the computer age, it holds up pretty well after all these years, and still sells quite well in eBook editions. Of course it was written on Z-80 computers – Niven had Tony Pietsch build 2 duplicates of Ezekial, one for himself and one for his wife Marilyn on the theory that he’d have a spare if ever needed. I managed to write the first science fiction novel using a computer. The late Dr.Robert Foreward of Hughes Laboratory wasn’t far behind: he used a UNIX system and an early UNIX line editing language called TECO that I had experimented with during a visit to MIT and decided was too difficult.

The LA Times article gets one thing wrong: although old Ezekial, my friend who happened to be a Z-80 computer, was given up for dead, he was revived at the request of the Smithsonian. I got him back together and shipped him off, then went to Washington to unpack him. The Smithsonian only wanted him for a display as the first computer to have been used to write a science fiction novel, but I wanted to wake him up so he could see where he was. I did that, and he got a good look before I put him back to sleep. For years he was in the hall of communications and computers, next to an old Imsai 8080. They closed that wing for refurbishment, and I think he’s back in the basement. 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.”

I wrote the first articles on Writing With Computers for BYTE and an unsuccessful McGraw Hill spin-off back in 1979, and in 1980 I started doing a BYTE column. At first it was just a series of articles on small computers, but BYTE’s Carl Helmers liked it and it became Computing At Chaos Manor. Meanwhile I kept writing science fiction and Niven and I produced Footfall, published in 1985. It was a New York Times #1 best seller.

As to the origins of word processing, the main contenders in the 1978-1981 era were WANG dedicated word processors and S-100 computers running the CP/M operating system. Barry Longyear wrote his SF works on a Wang, and Asimov’s published an article by Longyear and me in the form of a disputation. I contended that it was better to use a general purpose computer rather than a dedicated word processor. Events proved me right.

After IBM came out with DOS the picture changed from CP/M to DOS as the best selling operating system and Microsoft early on saw that word processing would be a major seller, but when Microsoft Word first came out it wasn’t good enough to induce Niven and me to change. We continued to use a series of programs, from the early Electric Pencil to Tony Pietsch’s WRITE to Semantec’s Q&A Write for quite a while until the Microsoft Word Czar Chris Peters asked us what it would take to get us to go over to WORD. We told him, and he did it. Since Microsoft had integrated the CDROM version of Bookshelf, an excellent spelling checker, and a thesaurus into Word we changed over, and we’ve used WORD ever since despite a concerted effort by Word Perfect to get us into their camp. Word Perfect’s spelling and grammar checkers were (then) better than Microsoft’s, but the Bookshelf and Thesaurus features were decisive.

There’s more on this in an old interview I did http://www.whedon.info/Joss-Whedon-SciFi-com-talks-to-SF.html . If Professor Kirschenbaum want to know more about the early history of word processing, I’m easy to find.

Bette, one of several computers I write with now. Zeke, my 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. Bette has 4 CPU chips, a terabyte of disk storage space, and 8 gigabytes of memory. And she runs considerably faster than the 2 MHZ that Zeke eventually upgraded to.

Another place to find more on this is http://use.perl.org/~Mark+Leighton+Fisher/journal/30464.

And Eric Pobirs has found in one of my anthologies, Black Holes, I mentioned using a computer write this stuff on, including a story of my introducing Niven to small computers. I think I’m probably safe enough on my claims…

I wrote the above after a number of readers referred me to the NYT article. My thanks to all of them. Here’s one:

Word processors and Authors article (NYTimes)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/books/a-literary-history-of-word-processing.html

"The literary history of word processing is far murkier, but that isn’t stopping Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, an associate professor of English at the University of Maryland, from trying to recover it, one casual deletion and trashed document at a time."

Mr. Pournelle,

When I read this article I thought back to all the stories you related in the old Byte magazine column you wrote, Chaos Manor. In those stories over the years I got the sense that not only were you an early adopter of technology, but you USED it regularly to get work done. So it occurred to me after reading this article in the NYTimes that the Professor from UMD, was concentrating on what seemed to be a very narrow group of well known and big name authors. People who had money to buy products like Wang word processors (Stephen King) while interesting for historic value, don’t really cover enough of the ‘range’ of the history of word processing software as it came to be defined.

So I wanted to toss this article over the fence to you. And ask, can this guy do a better job of covering the ‘history of word processing’ than he seems to be presenting in this article? I’m sure you have some both historical and anecdotal evidence to further lengthen the timeline beyond the ‘Late ’70s’. But I don’t want to be too presumptuous, I could just as easily be wrong, and off-base by thinking word processing was adopted earlier than the NYTimes covers it. But I thought at least a primary ‘source’ should be consulted, and you were the first person I thought of. Happy New Year to you. All the best. And I will always fondly remember reading, and will continue to read Chaos Manor.

Eric Likness

By the time I got Zeke, there was a technical book store called “American Word Processing” in the Silverlake district in Los Angeles. It wasn’t very large, but it carried books on small computers, and of course sold BYTE Magazine. Most Word Processors were dedicated Wang systems and were mostly used in legal offices. Barry Longyear got a Wang about the time I got Zeke, and we debated over dedicated word processors vs. “real computers” but in private (by letters!) and in published articles.

While searching for other stuff, I found this early discussion of what this place is about. It seemed appropriate to reference:

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/debates/meta.html