Profiles

Famous writers from Profiles

Profiles was this weird intersection. Don't know why it happened, but a lot of later famous writers wrote there. David Gerrold was established before he wrote for profiles [Profiles, July 1984]. He wrote the screenplay for Trouble with Tribbles, for the original Star Trek. He wrote [the novel] The Man Who Folded Himself. He wrote the Chtorr series.

Robert J. Sawyer, at the time, wrote for us.

Jack Nimershine. Ted Chiang. He wrote The Story of Your Life, and it was made into that 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. You know, it was supposedly questions from customers. I made up the question, I wrote 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 CPM machines didn't know CPM had a command processor. It was basically batch files that CPM versioned, or how to use PIP, because PIP was counterintuitive. It was PIP then target then source instead of PIP then source then target.

I would write up what I had run into, or what support had told me about. I would make up a name, Joe Cochrane from Akron, Ohio wants to know blah blah. And that was how I did that. But the articles were very different because the articles were ferociously factual. The column, that was just an excuse to be able to impart information.

But Diane Ingalls would not tolerate for one moment being loosey goosey with the facts. She'd walk in and hit me in the back of the head.
(Interview with Marshall Mosley)