Profiles

Famous writers from Profiles

Profiles was this weird intersection in time. I don't know why it happened, but a lot of writers who later became famous wrote for us, though David Gerrold was established before he wrote for Profiles [Profiles, July 1984]. Gerrold wrote the teleplay for Trouble with Tribbles, for the original Star Trek TV series, the novel The Man Who Folded Himself, and the War Against the Chtorr series. Robert J. Sawyer and Ted Chiang, both later multiple Hugo and Nebula Award winners, wrote for us. So did Jack Nimersheim, who was nominated for a Hugo. In the mid-90s Ted Chiang wrote The Story of Your Life, which was later made into the movie Arrival, with Amy Adams.
(Interview with Marshall Mosley)

Profiles Q&A Column

I had a column called Q&A, which was completely made up. It was supposedly questions from customers but I just made up the question and then the answer. I tried to come up with things that I thought people should know. It was things that weren't immediately obvious, like a lot of people who bought CP/M machines didn't know CP/M had a command processor. You could create batch files just as you could with MS-DOS. Or I’d explain how to use PIP, because PIP was counterintuitive. It was ‘PIP then target then source’ instead of ‘PIP then source then target’.

I would create questions and answers from issues I had run into, or what support had told me about. I would make things up like ‘Joe Cochrane from Akron, Ohio wants to know blah blah’ and then answer it. It was just a way to impart technical information the subscribers needed.

But the articles were very different because the articles were ferociously factual. Diane Ingalls would not tolerate for one moment being loosey-goosey with the facts. If she thought I was doing that, she'd walk in to my office and hit me in the back of the head.
(Interview with Marshall Mosley)

Early Profiles avoided talking about Kaypro

FR: The earlier profiles appeared to almost avoid talking about Kaypro products.

It was the original [actually the second] editor, and I never worked for him, I think I met him once before he left. His name was Tyler Sperry. When he left Gwyn Price took over and she was a very impressive woman. Hard charging, good humored, just nice. Didn't take any BLANK from anyone, but a very, very positive person. And that's when the magazine changed. More about technical detail, more about what customers needed, more about what they were interested in. She came on I think about four months before I started working at the magazine.
(Interview with Marshall Mosley)