Penn Jillette's Surprising Success as a Computer Columnist

Penn Jillette, as a magazine columnist, strikes an interesting pose. Clearly, it was never a top line item on his resume, and it took place when being a prominent tech journalist tended to have a smaller profile than it does today. But he still did well enough in the role that, for a time, he became one of the best-known editorial voices on technology in the country, one that only occasionally mentioned his day job. Now, tech writing of this era doesn't have the pedigree of, say, good music journalism in the 1970s. Certainly, there were good tech writers during this time, particularly free-wheeling voices like fellow moonlighter Jerry Pournelle of Byte, hard-nosed insiders like journeyman scribe John C. Dvorak and the long-anonymous Robert X. Cringely, and well-considered newspaper voices of reason like syndicated columnist Kim Komando and the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg.