There’s a certain liberation to having a blog nobody really reads. I’m mostly documenting things I’m setting up just to understand it better as I go and maybe help others, but I’m not really thinking about an audience per se.
I’m in that age range where I’m old enough to remember Jerry Pournelle’s columns in BYTE magazine, though too young to have read his books, which seem to me to be more a thing of their time. I ended up reading more Robert Silverberg, who was a mainstay for short stories in magazines like Omni and Playboy. The one thing I remember about him was he co-wrote the infamous “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex” essay. His work, as I say, was of a certain time.
Pournelle’s columns were basically him documenting how he was using computers and software as writing tools. He’d go on about updating graphics cards, new versions of WordPerfect, or whatever he was using at the time, building out new machines, etc. He’d talk about handing down hardware to his son, setting up a work machine for his wife, and other mundane tasks involved with keeping home computers running. He’d give all of the computers names. I think they were mostly custom-built from off-the-shelf hardware running CP/M, much of this was before the IBM PC came out, let alone luggables and compatibles.
It was interesting to read, you wouldn’t know that he wasn’t a software professional, but this was a fair amount of activity just to support his day job of writing. Overall there was this philosophy of not letting the tools get in the way of the work, to keep your eye on the end product.
So, that’s kind of what I’m going for. It’s a side-quest, though Jerry Pournelle probably got paid pretty well for his columns, which no doubt helped pay the bills between books.