In 1985, it was the ARPAnet (research) and MILnet (military/government). It was funded by the US Government, and was not the open "Internet" we enjoy today, which consists of thousands of privately-owned interconnected networks.
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 own an Omega Seamaster (James Bond Special Edition) - the last thing given to me by my wife before she passed away... However, my dream is to one day be able to afford a used stainless-steel Rolex Sea-Dweller or Submariner.
This was at a point when most people already had broadband, and used dialup modems were dirt-cheap on eBay (e.g., that's why she had a stack of USR Courier V.Everything models instead of Sportsters). IIRC I got a few of them from toss-out piles at ISPs I worked for, and some were my own stash from before I went to ISDN then cablemodem at home.
I couldn't depend on her to unplug everything every time there was a storm.
I was surprised that UPS will now do overnight delivery of Amazon orders to my mom's house in rural Oklahoma (she's at least a mile from her nearest neighbor), even though the truck originates from Lawton, OK - 50 miles away according to Google Maps.
Her "broadband" connection is a 2-6/2Mbps Wimax connection via an antenna on the roof to the nearest town a few miles away. It's still weird being able to sit out "in the middle of nowhere", talking to friends online, and order stuff I need and still have it show up the next day. Was a lifesaver when I stayed there for two weeks back in March after she had a hospital stay, and I needed a proper office chair and a folding table to act as a desk rather than using her kitchen table.
Was still able to work remotely just fine (most of my stuff was SSH to remote servers, and a web browser).
More surprising is that when I did the same thing earlier this month to help her after knee replacement surgery, that I could get T-Mobile LTE inside her house - back in March, I'd only been able to get it while sitting on the front porch.
Quite a change from a few years ago when all she could get was 21.6Kbps dialup, and I had to send her a literal pile of USR Courier modems with instructions "if you have a lightning storm and the modem won't work the next day, throw that one in the trash and plug in another from the stack."
I can see their point about "We need to keep this VAX around because building on actual hardware is different from building on emulation", however I'm sure there's bits of infrastructure, CRTs hooked to KVMs, etc, that could be replaced with newer and more efficient gear that can help with the power bill. You don't have to run the ENTIRE place on cast-off donations and stuff out of a dumpster.
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.