Penn Jillette’s Surprising Success as a Computer Columnist (opens in new tab)

Over the years, I've really come to appreciate Penn Jillette as a public person. Always pops up with new interests and insights.

Believe it or not, something about his recent appearance on Rogan inspired me to cut down my drinking. Just the way he made a life of temperance seem aspirationally cool (and not just cool in a Christian rock sort of way)

Penn created Desert Bus...worst computer game ever.

https://www.polygon.com/2013/7/10/4510388/why-teller-created...

I remember reading that column regularly. One in particular that I recall was a joke he proposed for the (then much less serious) airport security. If I'm remembering correctly, back in the day they wanted you to turn laptops on to show someone that it really was just a computer. Jillette proposed that maybe you should set your autoexec file start the computer saying something along the lines of "bomb detonating in 5...4...3...2...1" to freak them out...or it was something like that. Obviously pre-9/11. You'd probably get detained at the very least (and maybe arrested) if you did something like that these days. Maybe I will be able to find that column again...

Edit: oops, the article mentioned that very incident at the end.

This contextualizes the Hackers cameo a little.

Am I the only one who remembers logging into Penn's public BBS in the late 80s? Each screen would finish with "push any key to proceed to the next screen" followed by "except that one." Ancient history I know, but he's been into computers since the beginning of the PC was.

One of his buddies is Rob Pike.

I love his “thurman” idea.... definitely going to use that the next time someone asks me for help with a computer problem. Ehh, maybe only in April since it’s a little mean.

The dial-up BBS Penn and Teller ran around 1990 was quite good.

I was an avid reader of PC/Computing in middle school and vividly remember calling that fake ad number.

I still feel like the duo just cashed in on wrecking the magic of magic by focusing on just revealing the mechanics of how it's done. Obviously, not a problem for dry adults, but there's an in between world of folks who suspend their disbelief and the fun of doing that for the rest of us.