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95-507: The machine had internal extension slots, which could be used for extra serial ports , network cards or third party extensions like an Intel 8088 processor, adding MS-DOS compatibility. Rising Star Industries was the primary American software vendor for the HASCI QX series. Their product line included the TPM-II and III operating system, Valdocs, a robust BASIC language implementation,

190-701: A Cromemco Z-2 with iCom 8-inch soft-sectored floppy disk drives"; he also owned a TRS-80 Model I , and the first subject discussed in the column was an add-on that permitted it to use the same data and CP/M applications as the Cromemco. The next column appeared in December 1980 with the subtitle "BASIC, Computer Languages, and Computer Adventures"; Ezekiel II, a Compupro S-100 CP/M system, debuted in March 1983. Other computers received nicknames, such as Zorro , Pournelle's "colorful" Zenith Z-100 , and Lucy Van Pelt ,

285-472: A Intel 8086-2 CPU at 8 MHz, 128 to 512 KB of RAM and two 3½" floppy drives (360 KB format). The sound chip has 3 sound tones plus one noise channel with 16 independent volume levels, graphics are 640x400 and the joystick ports are Atari 2600 compatible. There was also support for custom ROM cartridges . Its successor, the dual-processor QX-16, added a 16-bit Intel processor with Color Graphics Adapter enabling it to also boot MS-DOS 2.11. The case of

380-459: A Ph.D. in political science in March 1964. His master's thesis is titled "Behavioural observations of the effects of personality needs and leadership in small discussion groups", and is dated 1957. Pournelle's Ph.D. dissertation is titled "The American political continuum; an examination of the validity of the left-right model as an instrument for studying contemporary American political 'isms'". Pournelle married Roberta Jane Isdell in 1959;

475-513: A cross-over , roll-over or null modem cable must be used. Generally, serial port connectors are gendered , only allowing connectors to mate with a connector of the opposite gender. With D-subminiature connectors, the male connectors have protruding pins, and female connectors have corresponding round sockets. Either type of connector can be mounted on equipment or a panel; or terminate a cable. Connectors mounted on DTE are likely to be male, and those mounted on DCE are likely to be female (with

570-433: A phone connector , usually the smaller 2.5 or 3.5 mm connectors and the most basic 3-wire interface—transmit, receive and ground. 8P8C connectors are also used in many devices. The EIA/TIA-561 standard defines a pinout using this connector, while the rollover cable (or Yost standard) is commonly used on Unix computers and network devices, such as equipment from Cisco Systems . Many models of Macintosh favor

665-524: A ribbon cable to the more standard 9-pin DE-9 connector (and frequently mounted on a free slot plate or other part of the housing). The following table lists commonly used RS-232 signals and pin assignments: Signal Ground is a common return for the other connections; it appears on two pins in the Yost standard but is the same signal. The DB-25 connector includes a second Protective Ground on pin 1, which

760-453: A "fussbudget" IBM PC ; he referred to generic PC compatibles as "PClones". Pournelle often denounced companies that announced vaporware , sarcastically writing that they would arrive " Real Soon Now " (later abbreviated to just "RSN"), and those that used software copy protection . As part of a redesign in June 1984, the magazine renamed the popular column to "Computing at Chaos Manor", and

855-582: A 1997 article, Norman Spinrad wrote that Pournelle had written the SDI portion of Ronald Reagan 's State of the Union Address , as part of a plan to use SDI to get more money for space exploration using the larger defense budget. Pournelle wrote in response that while the Citizens' Advisory Council on National Space Policy "wrote parts of Reagan's 1983 SDI speech, and provided much of the background for

950-500: A UART integrated circuit, all these settings can be software-controlled. Hardware from the 1980s and earlier may require setting switches or jumpers on a circuit board. The configuration for serial ports designed to be connected to a PC has become a de facto standard, usually stated as 9600/8-N-1. Serial ports use two-level (binary) signaling, so the data rate in bits per second is equal to the symbol rate in baud . The total speed includes bits for framing (stop bits, parity, etc.) and so

1045-473: A bit rate by observing what a connected device is sending and synchronizing to it. The number of data bits in each character can be 5 (for Baudot code ), 6 (rarely used), 7 (for true ASCII ), 8 (for most kinds of data, as this size matches the size of a byte ), or 9 (rarely used). 8 data bits are almost universally used in newer applications. 5 or 7 bits generally only make sense with older equipment such as teleprinters. Most serial communications designs send

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1140-669: A collection of links. In his book Dave Barry in Cyberspace , humorist Dave Barry has fun with Pournelle's guru column in Byte magazine. Pournelle, in collaboration with his wife, Roberta (who was an expert on reading education) wrote the commercial education software program called Reading: The Learning Connection. Pournelle served as campaign research director for the mayoral campaign of 1969 for Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty (Democrat), working under campaign director Henry Salvatori . The election took place on May 27, 1969. Pournelle

1235-533: A college-undergraduate assistant and up to myself. (Not that I'm the last word in sophistication, but I do sit here and pound this machine a lot; if I can't get something to work, it takes an expert.) Fair warning, then: the very nature of this column limits its scope. I can't talk about anything I can't run on my machines, nor am I likely to discuss things I have no use for. Among recurring characters were Pournelle's family members, friends, and many computers. He introduced to readers "my friend Ezekiel, who happens to be

1330-689: A computer to write in 1977 on the advice of his "mad" friend Dan MacLean. He wrote the "Computing at Chaos Manor" column in Byte , describing experiences with computer hardware and software, some purchased and some sent by vendors for review, at his home office. Because Pournelle was then, according to the magazine, "virtually Byte ' s only writer who was a mere user—he didn't create compilers and computers, he merely used them", it began as "The User's Column" in July 1980. Subtitled "Omikron TRS-80 Boards, NEWDOS+, and Sundry Other Matters", an Editor's Note accompanied

1425-429: A corrupted transmission with an even number of errors will pass the parity check. A single parity bit does not allow implementation of error correction on each character, and communication protocols working over serial data links will typically have higher-level mechanisms to ensure data validity and request retransmission of data that has been incorrectly received. The parity bit in each character can be set to one of

1520-553: A fruitful collaboration with Larry Niven ; he has also collaborated on novels with Roland J. Green , Michael F. Flynn , and Steven Barnes , and collaborated as an editor on an anthology series The Endless Frontier with John F. Carr . In 2010, his daughter Jennifer R. Pournelle (writing as J.R. Pournelle), an archaeology professor, e-published a novel Outies , an authorized sequel to the Mote in God's Eye series. Pournelle began using

1615-527: A government job for Pournelle's son, Richard. At the time, Pournelle and Gingrich were reported to be collaborating on "a science fiction political thriller." Pournelle's relationship with Gingrich was long established even then, as Pournelle had written the preface to Gingrich's book, Window of Opportunity (1985). Years after Byte shuttered, Pournelle wrote his Chaos Manor column online. He reprised it at Byte.com, which he helped launch with journalist Gina Smith , John C. Dvorak , and others. However, after

1710-479: A graphics API library used by a variety of products which initially supported line drawing and fill functions and was later extended to support the QX-16 color boards, Z80 assembler , and low level Zapple machine code monitor which could be invoked from DIP switch setting on the rear of the machine. The "Abacus" is a IBM PC compatible machine released in 1985 booting MS-DOS 2.11 from 64 KB ROM . It has

1805-627: A history of computing. A memorable column in August 1989 was "The Great Power Spike", which gives a digital necropsy of his electronic equipment after high voltage transmission wires dropped onto the power line for his neighborhood. After the print version of Byte ended publication in the United States, Pournelle continued publishing the column for the online version and international print editions of Byte . In July 2006, Pournelle and Byte declined to renew their contract and Pournelle moved

1900-418: A mechanism to resend data which has not been received correctly (e.g. TCP ). Jerry Pournelle Jerry Eugene Pournelle ( / p ʊər ˈ n ɛ l / ; August 7, 1933 – September 8, 2017) was an American scientist in the area of operations research and human factors research , a science fiction writer, essayist, journalist, and one of the first bloggers . In the 1960s and early 1970s, he worked in

1995-671: A number of years was a high church Anglican , in part because Anglican theology was virtually identical to Catholic theology , with the exception that the Anglicans accepted as moral the use of birth control. Pournelle eventually returned to the Catholic Church, as his other beliefs were consistent with the Catholic communion, although he did not agree with the Church's position on birth control. Despite his estrangement from

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2090-611: A pro- Vietnam War advertisement in Galaxy Science Fiction . During the 1970s and 1980s, he also published articles on military tactics and war gaming in the military simulations industry in Avalon Hill 's magazine The General . That led him into correspondences with some of the early figures in Dungeons & Dragons and other fantasy role-playing games. Two of his collaborations with Larry Niven reached

2185-684: A semi-regular (i.e.: every 2 to 3 months) basis, which would cover the wild microcomputer goings-on at the Pournelle House ("Chaos Manor") in Southern California. We said yes. Herewith the first installment ... Pournelle stated that This will be a column by and for computer users, and with rare exceptions I won't discuss anything I haven't installed and implemented here in Chaos Manor. At Chaos Manor we have computer users ranging in sophistication from my 9-year-old through

2280-413: A sequel to Space Viking but abandoned this in the early 1990s, however John F. Carr and Mike Robertson completed this sequel, entitled The Last Space Viking , and it was published in 2011. In 2013, Variety reported that motion picture rights to Pournelle's novel Janissaries had been acquired by the newly formed Goddard Film Group, headed by Gary Goddard . The IMDb website reported that

2375-532: A serial stream , the term serial port usually denotes hardware compliant with RS-232 or a related standard, such as RS-485 or RS-422 . Modern consumer personal computers (PCs) have largely replaced serial ports with higher-speed standards, primarily USB. However, serial ports are still frequently used in applications demanding simple, low-speed interfaces, such as industrial automation systems, scientific instruments, point of sale systems and some industrial and consumer products. Server computers may use

2470-415: A serial port as a control console for diagnostics, while networking hardware (such as routers and switches ) commonly use serial console ports for configuration, diagnostics, and emergency maintenance access. To interface with these and other devices, USB-to-serial converters can quickly and easily add a serial port to a modern PC. Modern devices use an integrated circuit called a UART to implement

2565-833: A serial port. This IC converts characters to and from asynchronous serial form, implementing the timing and framing of data specified by the serial protocol in hardware. The IBM PC implements its serial ports, when present, with one or more UARTs. Very low-cost systems, such as some early home computers , would instead use the CPU to send the data through an output pin, using the bit banging technique. These early home computers often had proprietary serial ports with pinouts and voltage levels incompatible with RS-232. Before large-scale integration (LSI) made UARTs common, serial ports were commonly used in mainframes and minicomputers , which would have multiple small-scale integrated circuits to implement shift registers, logic gates, counters, and all

2660-502: A shakeup, he announced that rather than stay at United Business Media, he would follow Smith, Dvorak, and 14 other news journalists to start an independent tech and politics site called anewdomain.net. As an active director of that site and others it launched, Pournelle wrote, edited, and worked with young writers and journalists on the craft of writing about science and tech. Beginning during his tenure at Boeing Company, Pournelle submitted science fiction short stories to John W. Campbell ,

2755-751: A textbook at the United States Military Academy (West Point), the United States Air Force Academy (Colorado Springs), the Air War College , and the National War College . He told fellow author Robert Heinlein , Pournelle recalled, "that once I got into advance plans at Boeing I probably wrote more science fiction than he did, and I didn't have to put characters in mine". In the late 1950s, while conducting operations research at

2850-431: A website with a daily online journal, "View from Chaos Manor," a blog dating from before the use of that term. It is a collection of his "Views" and "Mail" from a large variety of readers. This is a continuation of his 1980s blog-like online journal on GEnie . He said he resists using the term "blog" because he considered the word ugly, and because he maintained that his "View" is primarily a vehicle for writing rather than

2945-619: Is none , with error detection handled by a communication protocol. To allow detection of messages damaged by line noise , electromechanical teleprinters were arranged to print a special character when received data contained a parity error. Stop bits sent at the end of every character allow the receiving signal hardware to detect the end of a character and to resynchronize with the character stream. Electronic devices usually use one stop bit. If slow electromechanical teleprinters are used, one-and-one half or two stop bits may be required. The data/parity/stop (D/P/S) conventional notation specifies

Epson QX-10 - Misplaced Pages Continue

3040-629: Is not designed to be used as a substitute for an office machine. It simply takes too darned long to get a business letter out using Valdocs. Just getting the envelope addressed can take a full minute or longer." He reiterated that "the hardware is fine", but wondered if "the industry need yet another Z80 computer for more than $ 2500" without usable software. Pournelle concluded, "I cannot in good conscience recommend [Valdocs] to anyone who has actual production work to perform. It's just too darned slow." The president of one QX-10 user group complained in April that

3135-462: Is 16 times the fastest bit rate, and the serial port circuit can easily divide this down to lower frequencies as required. The capability to set a bit rate does not imply that a working connection will result. Not all bit rates are possible with all serial ports. Some special-purpose protocols such as MIDI for musical instrument control, use serial data rates other than the teleprinter standards. Some serial port implementations can automatically choose

3230-518: Is a cartesian diagram in which the X-axis gauges opinion toward state and centralized government (farthest right being state worship, farthest left being the idea of a state as the "ultimate evil"), and the Y-axis measures the belief that all problems in society have rational solutions (top being complete confidence in rational planning, bottom being complete lack of confidence in rational planning). In

3325-435: Is an output on a DTE device is an input on a DCE device and vice versa, so a DCE device can be connected to a DTE device with a straight wired cable, in which each pin on one end goes to the same numbered pin on the other end. Conventionally, computers and terminals are DTE, while peripherals such as modems are DCE. If it is necessary to connect two DTE (or DCE) devices together, a cable with reversed TX and RX lines, known as

3420-458: Is intended to be connected by each device to its own frame ground or similar. Connecting Protective Ground to Signal Ground is a common practice but not recommended. Note that EIA/TIA 561 combines DSR and RI, and the Yost standard combines DSR and DCD. Operating systems usually create symbolic names for the serial ports of a computer, rather than requiring programs to refer to them by hardware address. Unix-like operating systems usually label

3515-419: Is present and powered up so are usually asserted at all times. However, non-standard implementations exist, for example, printers that use DTR as flow control. Software handshaking is done for example with ASCII control characters XON/XOFF to control the flow of data. The XON and XOFF characters are sent by the receiver to the sender to control when the sender will send data, that is, these characters go in

3610-408: Is sent over the same channel as its data. The advantage of hardware handshaking is that it can be extremely fast, it works independently of imposed meaning such as ASCII on the transferred data and it is stateless . Its disadvantage is that it requires more hardware and cabling, and both ends of the connection must support the hardware handshaking protocol used. The advantage of software handshaking

3705-475: Is that it can be done with absent or incompatible hardware handshaking circuits and cabling. The disadvantage, common to all in-band control signaling, is that it introduces complexities in ensuring that control messages get through even when data messages are blocked, and data can never be mistaken for control signals. The former is normally dealt with by the operating system or device driver; the latter normally by ensuring that control codes are escaped (such as in

3800-552: The Childe Cycle mercenary stories by Gordon R. Dickson , as well as Heinlein's Starship Troopers , although Pournelle's work takes far fewer technological leaps than either of these. Pournelle was one of the few close friends of H. Beam Piper and was granted by Piper the rights to produce stories set in Piper's Terro-Human Future History. This right has been recognized by the Piper estate. Pournelle worked for some years on

3895-474: The C programming language with some modules written in compiled RSI Basic. The initial release of Valdocs included WYSIWYG word processor and spreadsheet applications (with onscreen fonts, an UNDO key, keyboard macros and multiple screen formats), a cardfile database, an E-Mail/communications module, and a desktop manager with an address book, mailing list manager, notepad, spell checker, ValDraw & ValPaint, calculator and more. The E-Mail program worked in

Epson QX-10 - Misplaced Pages Continue

3990-830: The De La Salle Christian Brothers ; despite its name, it was a high school at the time. He served in the United States Army during the Korean War . In 1953–54, after his military service, Pournelle attended the University of Iowa in Iowa City. Subsequently, he studied at the University of Washington , where he received a B.S. in psychology on June 11, 1955; an M.S. in psychology (experimental statistics) on March 21, 1958; and

4085-578: The IBM PC was in development when Rising Star closed in 1986. Valdocs shipped to beta testers c. late 1982. Beta and initial production releases of Valdocs' application modules were written in the Forth programming language while its system-oriented modules (such as E-Mail and disk utilities) were written in Z-80 Assembly Language . Later releases of Valdocs' applications were written in

4180-569: The Kermit protocol ) or omitted by design (such as in ANSI terminal control ). If no handshaking is employed, an overrun receiver might simply fail to receive data from the transmitter. Approaches for preventing this include reducing the speed of the connection so that the receiver can always keep up, increasing the size of buffers so it can keep up averaged over a longer time, using delays after time-consuming operations (e.g. in termcap ) or employing

4275-470: The background allowing mail to be sent by modem to another computer. Valdocs was one of the first environments that allowed users to embed items like spreadsheets and figures in word processing documents. Chris Rutkowski and Roger Amidon worked on the preliminary QX-10 design; Amidon continued designing software for the QX system after Epson and Rising Star Inc. stopped production. Graphic and other software for

4370-793: The 20 signals that are defined by the standard, connectors with fewer pins are often used. While specific examples follow, countless other connectors have been used for RS-232 connections. The 9-pin DE-9 connector has been used by most IBM-compatible PCs since the Serial/Parallel Adapter option for the PC-AT , where the 9-pin connector allowed a serial and parallel port to fit on the same card. This connector has been standardized for RS-232 as TIA-574 . Some miniaturized electronics, particularly graphing calculators and hand-held amateur and two-way radio equipment, have serial ports using

4465-643: The Aerospace Corporation in San Bernardino, California where he was Editor of Project 75 , a major study of all ballistic missile technology for the purpose of making recommendations to the US Air Force on investment in technologies required to build the missile force to be deployed in 1975. After Project 75 was completed Pournelle became manager of several advanced concept studies. At North American Rockwell’s Space Division, Pournelle

4560-643: The Catholic Church, he opposed having the government require that Catholic institutions provide access to birth control or abortion. He wrote that Sunday attendance at St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church, in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles , was part of his family's routine. Upon his death, his family arranged a memorial mass at the church, on 16 September 2017. Pournelle was an intellectual protégé of Russell Kirk and Stefan T. Possony . Pournelle wrote numerous publications with Possony, including The Strategy of Technology (1970). The Strategy has been used as

4655-563: The Human Factors Laboratory at Boeing, where his group did pioneering work on astronaut heat tolerance in extreme environments. His group also did experimental work that resulted in certification of the passenger oxygen system for the Boeing 707 airplane. He later worked as a Systems Analyst in a design and analysis group at the company, where he did strategic analysis of proposed new weapons systems. In 1964, Pournelle joined

4750-467: The QX-10 and QX-16 were developed by program designers such as Dan Oja and Nelson Donley. Switching between programs was done by pressing an associated hotkey on the QX-10's keyboard (which was specifically designed to support Valdocs, including an UNDO key) or by selecting a program from a menu the hotkey invoked. The keyboard was referred to as HASCI (Human Application Standard Computer Interface) after

4845-547: The QX-16 reported that the computer was "severely limited by [Valdocs'] slow operation". While the reviewer did not report crashes, a "small but perceptible delay" between pushing a key and the character appearing on the screen when using the word processor grew over time to be "significant and would annoy heavy-duty word processing users", and the spreadsheet was "excruciatingly slow to do just about everything". Pournelle concluded that year that Valdocs "was fatally flawed", noting that Epson advised Valdocs 2 users to share data between

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4940-429: The QX-16 was enlarged to provide enough physical space for an internal hard-drive in contrast to the QX-10's dual- floppy configuration. VAL uable DOC ument S by Rising Star Industries is a pseudo- GUI WYSIWYG integrated software /OS for document creation and management, written as a set of interactive application and system modules which ran only on Epson's QX-10 and QX-16 computers. A version designed to run on

5035-603: The United States. According to a Wall Street Journal article, "Pournelle estimates that for what the Iraq war has cost so far, the United States could have paid for a network of nuclear power stations sufficient to achieve energy independence, and bankrupt the Arabs for once and for all." Pournelle created the Pournelle chart in his doctoral dissertation, a 2-dimensional coordinate system used to distinguish political ideologies. It

5130-528: The accompanying letter column became "Chaos Manor Mail". Pournelle still used "Zeke" to write as late as 1987, but admitted that he would soon have to use PCs because tools like Borland Sidekick were unavailable. He hesitated, Pournelle said, because Niven would buy two exact copies of his writing computer and software. He announced in February 1989 that the Smithsonian had asked for "Zeke" as part of

5225-590: The aerospace industry, but eventually focused on his writing career. In an obituary in Gizmodo , he was described as "a tireless ambassador for the future." Pournelle's hard science fiction writing received multiple awards. In addition to his solo writing, he wrote several novels with collaborators including Larry Niven . Pournelle served a term as President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America . Pournelle's journalism focused primarily on

5320-614: The approximate accuracy of the term paleoconservatism as applying to him. He distinguished his conservativism from the alternative neoconservatism , noting that he had been drummed out of the Conservative movement by "the egregious Frum", referring to prominent neoconservative, David Frum . Notably, Pournelle opposed the Gulf War and the Iraq War , maintaining that the money would be better spent developing energy technologies for

5415-434: The article: The other day we were sitting around the Byte offices listening to software and hardware explosions going off around us in the microcomputer world. We wondered, "Who could cover some of the latest developments for us in a funny, frank (and sometimes irascible) style?" The phone rang. It was Jerry Pournelle with an idea for a funny, frank (and sometimes irascible) series of articles to be presented in Byte on

5510-491: The bits within each byte just before sending and just after receiving. Parity is a method of detecting errors in transmission. When parity is used with a serial port, an extra data bit is sent with each data character, arranged so that the number of 1 bits in each character, including the parity bit, is always odd or always even. If a byte is received with the wrong number of 1s, then it must have been corrupted. Correct parity does not necessarily indicate absence of corruption as

5605-512: The book Road to Survival by the ecologist (and ornithologist) William Vogt , who depicted an Earth denuded of species other than humans, all of them headed for squalor. Concerned about the Malthusian dangers of human overpopulation , and considering the Catholic Church's position on contraception to be untenable, he left the Catholic Church while an undergraduate at the University of Iowa. Pournelle eventually returned to religion, and for

5700-613: The cable connectors being the opposite). However, this is far from universal; for instance, most serial printers have a female DB25 connector, but they are DTEs. In this circumstance, the appropriately gendered connectors on the cable or a gender changer can be used to correct the mismatch. The only connector specified in the original RS-232 standard was the 25-pin D-subminiature, however, many other connectors have been used to save money or save on physical space, among other reasons. In particular, since many devices do not use all of

5795-625: The chart maker and word processor with "scissors, tape, and a copy machine". Serial port A serial port is a serial communication interface through which information transfers in or out sequentially one bit at a time. This is in contrast to a parallel port , which communicates multiple bits simultaneously in parallel . Throughout most of the history of personal computers , data has been transferred through serial ports to devices such as modems , terminals , various peripherals , and directly between computers. While interfaces such as Ethernet , FireWire , and USB also send data as

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5890-399: The column to his own web site, Chaos Manor Reviews. Pournelle claimed to be the first author to have written a published book contribution using a word processor on a personal computer , in 1977. In the 1980s, Pournelle was an editor and columnist for Survive , a survivalist magazine. He wrote the monthly column "The Micro Revolution" for Popular Computing from April 1984 until

5985-466: The company, he envisioned a weapon consisting of massive tungsten rods dropped from high above the Earth. These super-dense, super-fast kinetic energy projectiles delivered enormous destructive force to the target without contaminating the environs with radioactive isotopes, as would occur with a nuclear bomb. Pournelle named his superweapon “Project Thor”. Others called it " Rods from God ". Pournelle headed

6080-529: The computer industry, astronomy, and space exploration. From the 1970s until the early 1990s, he contributed to the computer magazine Byte , writing from the viewpoint of an intelligent user, with the oft-cited credo, "We do this stuff so you won't have to." He created one of the first blogs, entitled "Chaos Manor", which included commentary about politics, computer technology, space technology, and science fiction. Pournelle held paleoconservative political views, which were sometimes expressed in his fiction. He

6175-431: The connection must match for data to be received correctly. Bit rates commonly supported include 75, 110, 300, 1200, 2400, 4800, 9600, 19200, 38400, 57600 and 115200 bit/s. Many of these standard modem baud rates are multiples of either 1.2 kbps (e.g., 19200, 38400, 76800) or 0.9 kbps (e.g., 57600, 115200). Crystal oscillators with a frequency of 1.843200 MHz are sold specifically for this purpose. This

6270-415: The control lines of a serial port to monitor external devices, without exchanging serial data. A common commercial application of this principle was for some models of uninterruptible power supply which used the control lines to signal loss of power, low battery, and other status information. At least some Morse code training software used a code key connected to the serial port to simulate actual code use;

6365-423: The couple had five children. His wife, and son, naval officer Phillip, and daughter, archaeologist Jennifer, have also written science fiction in collaboration with their father. In 2008, Pournelle battled a brain tumor, which appeared to respond favorably to radiation treatment. An August 28, 2008 report on his weblog claimed he was now cancer-free. Pournelle suffered a stroke on December 16, 2014, for which he

6460-471: The data bits within each byte least significant bit first. Also possible, but rarely used, is most significant bit first; this was used, for example, by the IBM 2741 printing terminal. The order of bits is not usually configurable within the serial port interface but is defined by the host system. To communicate with systems that require a different bit ordering than the local default, local software can re-order

6555-503: The editor of Astounding Science Fiction (later called Analog Science Fiction and Fact ), but Campbell did not accept any of Pournelle's submissions until shortly before Campbell's death in 1971, when he accepted for publication Pournelle's novelette "Peace with Honor." From the beginning, Pournelle's work has engaged strong military themes. Several books are centered on a fictional mercenary infantry force known as Falkenberg's Legion . There are strong parallels between these stories and

6650-409: The effective data rate is lower than the bit transmission rate. For example, with 8-N-1 character framing, only 80% of the bits are available for data; for every eight bits of data, two more framing bits are sent. A standard series of rates is based on multiples of the rates for electromechanical teleprinters ; some serial ports allow many arbitrary rates to be selected, but the speeds on both sides of

6745-499: The end of a six-page document takes 15 seconds. Deleting the first three pages of the same document takes 20 seconds". He believed that the software "has pushed the Zilog Z80 chip past its limits ... I don't think Valdocs will ever run properly until something like the 8086 or 68000 is used". In January 1984 Pournelle reported that version 1.18 "is fast, [but] it's not fast enough for me, my wife, or my assistant. In particular, it

6840-451: The film was in development, and that husband-and-wife writing team, Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens , had written the screenplay. Pournelle began fiction writing non-SF work under a pseudonym in 1965. His early SF was published under the name "Wade Curtis", in Analog and other magazines. Some works were also published under the name "J.E. Pournelle". In the mid-1970s, Pournelle began

6935-494: The following: Aside from uncommon applications that use the last bit (usually the 9th) for some form of addressing or special signaling, mark or space parity is uncommon, as it adds no error detection information. Odd parity is more useful than even parity since it ensures that at least one state transition occurs in each character, which makes it more reliable at detecting errors like those that could be caused by serial port speed mismatches. The most common parity setting, however,

7030-435: The framing of a serial connection. The most common usage on microcomputers is 8/N/1 (8N1). This specifies 8 data bits, no parity, 1 stop bit. In this notation, the parity bit is not included in the data bits. 7/E/1 (7E1) means that an even parity bit is added to the 7 data bits for a total of 8 bits between the start and stop bits. Flow control is used in circumstances where a transmitter might be able to send data faster than

7125-434: The magazine's closure in December 1985. The column focused on the ways microcomputers were reshaping society. In 2011, Pournelle joined journalist Gina Smith , pundit John C. Dvorak , political cartoonist Ted Rall , and several other Byte.com staff reporters to launch an independent tech and political news site, aNewDomain.net Pournelle served as director of aNewDomain until his death. After 1998, Pournelle maintained

7220-421: The more common devices that are connected to the serial port on a PC. Some of these such as modems and serial mice are falling into disuse while others are readily available. Serial ports are very common on most types of microcontroller , where they can be used to communicate with a PC or other serial devices. Since the control signals for a serial port can be driven by any digital signal , some applications used

7315-460: The opposite direction to the data being sent. The system starts in the sending allowed state. When the receiver's buffers approach capacity, the receiver sends the XOFF character to tell the sender to stop sending data. Later, after the receiver has emptied its buffers, it sends an XON character to tell the sender to resume transmission. It is an example of in-band signaling , where control information

7410-475: The other logic needed. As PCs evolved serial ports were included in the Super I/O chip and then in the chipset . The individual signals on a serial port are unidirectional and when connecting two devices, the outputs of one device must be connected to the inputs of the other. Devices are divided into two categories: data terminal equipment (DTE) and data circuit-terminating equipment (DCE). A line that

7505-533: The policy, we certainly did not write the speech… We were not trying to boost space, we were trying to win the Cold War". The Council's first report in 1980 became the transition team policy paper on space for the incoming Reagan administration. The third report was quoted in the Reagan "Star Wars" speech. James Wheatfield wrote that "Pournelle delights in setting up complex background situations and plots, leading

7600-473: The reader step by step towards a solution which is the very opposite of politically correct and… defying a dissenting reader to find where in this logical chain he or she would have acted differently." Pournelle suggested several "laws". He used the term "Pournelle's law" for the expression "One user, one CPU". He later amended this to "One user, at least one CPU" in a column in InfoWorld . He also used

7695-577: The receiver is able to process it. To cope with this, serial lines often incorporate a handshaking method. There are hardware and software handshaking methods. Hardware handshaking is done with extra signals, often the RS-232 RTS/CTS or DTR/DSR signal circuits. RTS and CTS are used to control data flow, signaling, for instance, when a buffer is almost full. Per the RS-232 standard and its successors, DTR and DSR are used to signal that equipment

7790-416: The related RS-422 standard, mostly using circular mini-DIN connectors . The Macintosh included a standard set of two ports for connection to a printer and a modem, but some PowerBook laptops had only one combined port to save space. 10P10C connectors can be found on some devices. Another common connector is a 10 × 2 pin header common on motherboards and add-in cards which is usually converted via

7885-406: The screen display lags as many as 60 characters behind your typing, and you lose characters". The magazine added that "VALDOCS crashed (failed) numerous times while we were using it to write this review. We lost data each time, came close to losing a whole disk, and ended up retyping it into our trusty IBM PC to meet deadline". It advised users to backup their files, but stated that since the process

7980-637: The serial port devices /dev/tty* . TTY is a common trademark-free abbreviation for teletype , a device commonly attached to early computers' serial ports, and * represents a string identifying the specific port; the syntax of that string depends on the operating system and the device. On Linux , 8250 / 16550 UART hardware serial ports are named /dev/ttyS* , USB adapters appear as /dev/ttyUSB* and various types of virtual serial ports do not necessarily have names starting with tty . The DOS and Windows environments refer to serial ports as COM ports: COM1, COM2,..etc. This list includes some of

8075-551: The status bits of the serial port could be sampled very rapidly and at predictable times, making it possible for the software to decipher Morse code. Serial computer mice may draw their operating power from the received data or control signals. Serial standards provide for many different operating speeds as well as adjustments to the protocol to account for different operating conditions. The most well-known options are speed, number of data bits per character, parity, and number of stop bits per character. In modern serial ports using

8170-489: The term "Pournelle's law" for "Silicon is cheaper than iron." That is, a computer is cheaper to upgrade than replace. A second aspect of this law was Pournelle's prediction that hard disk drives would eventually be replaced by solid-state memory , although he admitted that bubble memory had failed to do so as he had expected. He has also used "Pournelle's law" to apply to the importance of checking cable connections when diagnosing computer problems: "You'll find by and large,

8265-548: The top rankings in the New York Times Best Seller List . In 1977, Lucifer's Hammer reached number two. Footfall — wherein Heinlein was a thinly veiled minor character — reached the number one spot in 1986. Pournelle served as President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 1973. In 1994, Pournelle's friendly relationship with Newt Gingrich led to Gingrich securing

8360-412: The user interface with the same name pioneered by Rising Star Industries. Valdocs on the QX-10 was very slow and buggy. InfoWorld ' s 1983 review of the QX-10 described the software as " great idea, questionable implementation ". It reported that Valdocs on the computer "is slow . Sometimes it merely dawdles slightly, but other times, it crawls . Entering text becomes a disconcerting pastime when

8455-616: The word processor was "slow compared to my mother running the mile ... I have four different versions and not one works well". Creative Computing ' s mostly favorable review of the computer and software in June also noted the slow speed of the Valdocs editor, calling it "maddeningly slow in many cases". It noted that the QX-10's 4 MHz processor was not at fault, because other word processors ran as fast as on other 8-bit CP/M computers. Despite Epson's promise of speed improvements, Valdocs 2 remained slow; InfoWorld ' s 1985 review of

8550-669: Was a radio advertising executive and general manager of several radio stations. Ruth Pournelle, his mother, was a teacher, although during World War II, she worked in a munitions factory. He attended first grade at St. Anne's Elementary School, in Memphis, which had two grades to a classroom. Beginning with third grade, he attended Coleville Consolidated Elementary School, in Colevile, which had about 25 pupils per grade and four rooms and four teachers for 8 grades Pournelle attended high school at Christian Brothers College in Memphis, run by

8645-605: Was associate director of operations research, where he took part in the Apollo program and general operations. He was founding President of the Pepperdine Research Institute. In 1989, Pournelle, Max Hunter , and retired Army Lieutenant General Daniel O. Graham made a presentation to then Vice President Dan Quayle promoting development of the DC-X rocket. Pournelle was among those who in 1968 signed

8740-479: Was hospitalized for a time. By June 2015, he was writing again, though impairment from the stroke had slowed his typing. Pournelle died in his sleep of heart failure at his home in Studio City , California, on September 8, 2017. Pournelle was raised a Unitarian . He converted to Roman Catholicism while attending Christian Brothers College. Pournelle was introduced to Malthusian principles upon reading

8835-738: Was later named Executive Assistant to the Mayor in charge of research in September 1969, but resigned from the position after two weeks. After leaving Yorty's office, in 1970 he was a consultant to the Professional Educators of Los Angeles (PELA), a group opposed to the unionization of school teachers in LA. He is sometimes quoted as describing his politics as "somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan." Pournelle resisted others classifying him into any particular political group, but acknowledged

8930-754: Was one of the founders of the Citizens' Advisory Council on National Space Policy , which developed some of the Reagan Administration 's space initiatives, including the earliest versions of what would become the Strategic Defense Initiative . Pournelle was born in Shreveport, Louisiana , the seat of Caddo Parish in northwestern Louisiana , and later lived with his family in Capleville, Tennessee , an unincorporated area near Memphis . Percival Pournelle, his father,

9025-462: Was so slow the computer encouraged them to avoid doing so until it was too late. While praising the QX-10 itself ("Physically this is an excellent machine") and Valdocs' ease of use, Jerry Pournelle wrote in BYTE in August 1983 that "the first problem is obvious from the other side of the room. The Valdocs system is slow . It seems to take forever to do disk operations ... Getting from the beginning to

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