Jupiter Novels: Some years ago Dr. Charles Sheffield approached me with the idea of creating our own juvenile imprint. We would write both jointly and separately the kind of books we wanted young people to read, and also solicit others who write the kinds of things we like to write under that imprint.

The first one of those was HIGHER EDUCATION by Sheffield and myself; he writes faster than I do, and that was a difficult period in my life, so he did a LOT more of the work on that book than I did. The book has been deservedly successful, but most of that success is due to Charles, not me.

The stories in the Jupiter series have no intrinsic relationship to each other, and STARSWARM may actually spawn off a sequel (or stories set in its universe) that are not part of the Jupiter series at all.

CYRUS: A CYRIX P166 system (Cyrix doesn't make systems any more) that featured a CYRIX P-166 chip. This one has been upgraded with an Evergreen AMD 200 chip, so it's a Cyrix machine with no Cyrix chip, which is a bit unfair because CYRIX chips work just fine. It's a long story told in the old BYTE columns.