This month's Rhealstone project is in the DDJ tradition. This magazine began as a project to promulgate, and to allow programmers to refine a Basic interpreter. The very subject matter of the Rhealstone, though, points to the reason there isn't more of this community design work in these pages: A magazine does not live in real time.
I got a call from Lee Felsenstein last week (that is, right around Thanksgiving, real time). Lee has a new project in mind, a non-Apple hardware platform for stackware: HackerCard, if you will. The project implies some interesting programming challenges, not to mention the legal hurdles, that would be fun to hash out in DDJs pages. But given the time factor, the hashing-out will likely be done elsewhere, like on line.
We in magazine publishing call this communication barrier "lead time," and the effect is exactly as though we were radioing from somewhere beyond Pluto (the weeklies from Titan). I mentioned mail order electro-magnate Drew Kaplan in a column I wrote in October, but when Tyler was chatting (real time) with Drew a month later at Comdex, that column was still navigating the asteroid belt.
To give you an outside-time perspective, then: As I write this, it's 15 shopping days 'till Christmas, and the airwaves are filled with reminiscences of the thousand days of the New Frontier. As you read this, it's somewhere around Martin Luther King's birthday, approaching the thousandth hour of the Bush Fringe. Either way, a good time to be outside time.
Sometimes we in magazine publishing will have to deal with this time problem or we'll be relegated to rehashing the past. As I write this, both the 35th anniversary issue of Playboy and the 20th anniversary issue of The Whole Earth Review are remembering Jack Kerouak.
Skipping a beat, bimonthlies wobble in a different orbit altogether: I already have the (recommended) Jan./Feb. '89 issue of Micro Cornucopia, which reminds me that Dave Thompson, (although his magazine sometimes seems to lie outside the plane of the ecliptic,) is a serious and skilled professional.
As is Nick Herbert. You've probably noticed that DDJ doesn't cover quantum physics very thoroughly, and I doubt that that's going to change soon. Let me then recommend a good book, and a very good writer. Nick Herbert's Quantum Reality is more readable than most science books, and it deals with some remarkably difficult concepts, including Bell's Theorem.
Bell's Theorem permits a kind of instantaneous connection-at-a-distance that almost suggests that we could re-orient the arrow of time. Nick Herbert's second book is out now, it's called Faster Than Light: Superluminal Loopholes In Physics. Uh-oh, Toto. Herbert is exploring the possibility of superluminal communication at his National Science Foundation in the Santa Cruz mountains. Maybe faster-than-light communication can make magazine publishing timely.
A year ago in this space I made fun of the merchandising of Peter Norton, accusing him of aspirations to the title of Mr. Cultural Icon of 1988. Since then, Peter's been Dewar's Profiled and Inc. Five Hundreded. I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize to Peter for my snide remarks and to offer readers of DDJ a 50 percent discount on the Mike Swaine coffee mug when purchased with the Mike Swaine tee shirt.
That December Peter Norton Commemorative Issue of Inc. magazine, by the way, was an intriguing study in self-criticism. (But not like John Dvorak's still-asteroidal March 1989 MacUser column on MacUser columnists, which I read in manuscript in November.)
To get on the Inc. 500 list, your company has to grow real fast. Getting on the Inc. 500 list, suggest the Inc. editors in that selfsame Inc. 500 list issue, may not be a healthy goal for a small company. Making the list, they hint, may even be a sign of instability. Fascinating. Usually we in publishing apologize for our errors after we make them, if at all. Bundling the apology with the error is an innovative way to beat the lead time.
That same issue also featured the Cary Lu Lynching. Cary had claimed that the personal computer industry is undergoing enormous and rapid change, that no major software company is planning to introduce a new MS-DOS product after 1990, and that users will soon find themselves in a "microcomputer mess."
Inc. readers didn't care for Cary's negative thinking; and frankly, I suspect that it's just this sort of naysaying that's kept Cary from getting a Dewar's Profile all these years.
Copyright © 1989, Dr. Dobb's Journal