Pournelle was a GUEST USER of a system at MIT, accessing it through an ARPAnet dialup node (of which he did not have official permission to use).
The admins of said system requested that he not talk about non-official use of the ARPAnet in his BYTE column (so that the government people funding the network, not ask "why does this scifi writer have access to these systems?").
He persisted, and then he decided to be rude and mouth off to the people that ran the system he was a guest user of. When they got tired of it and locked his account, he threatened to use his contacts / influence to make things difficult for them, and falsely claimed it was due to politics and not his own entitled attitude.
How is that not being a huge jerk? Honestly, that's well into a-hole territory in my opinion.
I get all that -- I even quoted where they suggested the non-military it should be kept from the military guys.
What I say is that not having it kept
>How is that not being a huge jerk?
First, those people weren't the creators and payers of ARPAnet. The US government and the "military guys" were. So he wasn't "their guest" to begin with.
They just administered it. The admins of a system are not owners -- nor are their pals who they let in covertly.
Second, (and this holds whether you are a guest or not) if you're invited somewhere and see guys keeping a good thing to themselves and not wanting it to get noticed by the masses, you're not a jerk to dismiss their "radio silence" rule, and tell others about it.
They're the jerks for being silent about it (even if that was just out of fear from having it shut down).
Clearly the ARPAnet needed to open up to more people -- and eventually get to something like the internet.
Keeping silent about the "non-official use" because you are lucky to be in would be cowardly and selfish (I'm in, screw the masses, they don't have to know such a thing exists and people could potentially get join if we opened it up).
You think the only people who built the internet were "military guys"?
You think the ARPANET and MIT AI Lab should have been opened up to all of Byte Magazine's users, instead of Byte starting their own private commercial BIX network, and that MIT AI Lab staff should have supported all of those clueless newbies as well as the drunk and belligerent POURNE himself, instead of performing the research and development that was their day job?
You're totally off base, entitled, and have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. So educate yourself with the facts:
Read the MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy [1], which POURNE clearly violated.
[1] http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/tourist-policy.html
Then read POURNE's own gushing flattering words about how RMS took his own time to suffer him by teaching him about TECO and EMACS, and actually wrote him free software on demand to his specifications [2].
[2] https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reviews/bookmonth.html
>"I first met Richard Stallman (he called himself RMS in those days) when he was a graduate student at MIT and I was just learning about the ARPANET. He was immensely helpful to me in those days, patiently showing me things about emacs — his full-screen editor that he wrote in TECO, and the less said about TECO the better — as well as adding some special code to take care of things I wanted to accomplish. I learned then that RMS and I have a common failing: We don't suffer fools gladly or indeed at all, and we are sometimes wrong about who is a fool. But that's another story for another time."
And finally, read the words [3] of an anonymous MIT-AI Lab member who spent much of their own time helping POURNE and I as well as many other tourists. Even though POURNE isn't around to defend himself, I feel obligated to post this in response to the crass misunderstandings and misstatements of the facts in your attempt to smear the MIT AI Lab and its members (your own words: "Fuck them."), and because I agree with the point that "If he didn't want to have this as his enduring legacy, he had plenty of opportunity to make amends. And the offensive acts were not private ones.", and also with the points about asymmetric audience and the responsibility to do well by one's celebrity:
[3]
>We definitely had seen a great many "tourist" users, and it seemed to me that they would come away enriched. People spent a lot of time with Niven, Fuzzy (his wife, as I recall), and Pourne, showing them around the place, including them in the social aspects. ____ and I had him use the Lisp-teaching program. He used mailing lists to engage an interested audience.
>Then later, as I recall, he wrote publicly in negative terms about the whole of society that had welcomed him in, as if these were all abuses. As if he had a secret he was compelled to share, but not really a secret since so many knew. As if any community shared was just grist for the mill if it could be turned to buy celebrity.
>But the entire justification of tourist use was that the machines would otherwise sit idle. Any time I spent, and I suspect others spent, talking to him were unpaid. They made better use of resources than if those resources were used strictly as planned. But he didn't see it that way.
>That's his right. But it's my right to see him as neither courteous to his former hosts nor visionary about how the world works and should work, at least from those experiences. (I never got to reading his books, in part because of these other experiences. It soured me to the need.)
>But our public personas, the places we take a stand, are are our enduring legacies. It is our afterlife. I am not religious, and so what I do in life is a preparation for how I will be perceived when I am not around. I hold him to a like standard.
>If he didn't want to have this as his enduring legacy, he had plenty of opportunity to make amends. And the offensive acts were not private ones. They were ones he used his stature in the community to magnify in a way that those of us who were implicated had no similar way to respond.
>This, by the way, is the underlying basis of things like libel that make them differ from slander. I'm not alleging either slander or libel here, but I am saying that the key issue in libel is not just untruth, it's about the access one has to broad audience. If you say something in print and the person who needs to respond has no similar access to print, then your words have asymmetric effect in public conversation. The core issue is not print vs non-print, not paper vs word, in case you get confused about whether the internet is print. The core issue is audience. And even on the internet there is the issue of asymmetric audience.
>Asymmetric audience is prone to variations on the Peter Principle, where a good writer can gain audience that allows them to speak on other topics. There is considerable value in that, but also considerable responsibility to do well by one's celebrity.
Second, the network was for official government approved use only, which mostly meant research and communication between researchers. Everything else was an open secret, but officially under the radar.
At the same time, USENET was running on UUCP over TCP, which meant that the majority of traffic was alt.binaries, and a big chunk of that was porn.
So, yes, having an overly entitled jackass publicly embarrass them was something most admins feared. (My brush with greatness was Cat Yronwode and the cs.utexas mail to news gateway. But that was a decade after this.)