From the 1970s until the early 1990s, he contributed to the computer magazine Byte, writing from the viewpoint of an intelligent user, with the oft-cited credo, "We do this stuff so you won't have to.

[12] His master's thesis is titled "Behavioural observations of the effects of personality needs and leadership in small discussion groups", and is dated 1957.

[16] His wife, and son, naval officer Phillip, and daughter, archaeologist Jennifer, have also written science fiction in collaboration with their father.

Pournelle was introduced to Malthusian principles upon reading the book Road to Survival[25] by the ecologist (and ornithologist) William Vogt, who depicted an Earth denuded of species other than humans, all of them headed for squalor.

[25] He wrote that Sunday attendance at St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church, in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles, was part of his family's routine.

[28] He told fellow author Robert Heinlein, Pournelle recalled, "that once I got into advance plans at Boeing I probably wrote more science fiction than he did, and I didn't have to put characters in mine".

[7] In the late 1950s, while conducting operations research at the company, he envisioned a weapon consisting of massive tungsten rods dropped from high above the Earth.

These super-dense, super-fast kinetic energy projectiles delivered enormous destructive force to the target without contaminating the environs with radioactive isotopes, as would occur with a nuclear bomb.

[29] Pournelle headed the Human Factors Laboratory at Boeing, where his group did pioneering work on astronaut heat tolerance in extreme environments.

In 1964, Pournelle joined the Aerospace Corporation in San Bernardino, California where he was Editor of Project 75, a major study of all ballistic missile technology for the purpose of making recommendations to the US Air Force on investment in technologies required to build the missile force to be deployed in 1975.

In 1989, Pournelle, Max Hunter, and retired Army Lieutenant General Daniel O. Graham made a presentation to then Vice President Dan Quayle promoting development of the DC-X rocket.

[citation needed] Footfall — wherein Heinlein was a thinly veiled minor character — reached the number one spot in 1986.

However, after a shakeup, he announced that rather than stay at United Business Media, he would follow Smith, Dvorak, and 14 other news journalists to start an independent tech and politics site called anewdomain.net.

As an active director of that site and others it launched, Pournelle wrote, edited, and worked with young writers and journalists on the craft of writing about science and tech.

[43] The IMDb website reported that the film was in development, and that husband-and-wife writing team, Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, had written the screenplay.

Green, Michael F. Flynn, and Steven Barnes, and collaborated as an editor on an anthology series The Endless Frontier with John F. Carr.

Subtitled "Omikron TRS-80 Boards, NEWDOS+, and Sundry Other Matters", an Editor's Note accompanied the article:[48][49] The other day we were sitting around the Byte offices listening to software and hardware explosions going off around us in the microcomputer world.

(Not that I'm the last word in sophistication, but I do sit here and pound this machine a lot; if I can't get something to work, it takes an expert.)

Pournelle often denounced companies that announced vaporware, sarcastically writing that they would arrive "Real Soon Now"[53] (later abbreviated to just "RSN"), and those that used software copy protection.

[59] Pournelle claimed to be the first author to have written a published book contribution using a word processor on a personal computer, in 1977.

[62] He wrote the monthly column "The Micro Revolution" for Popular Computing from April 1984 until the magazine's closure in December 1985.

[63][64] In 2011, Pournelle joined journalist Gina Smith, pundit John C. Dvorak, political cartoonist Ted Rall, and several other Byte.com staff reporters to launch an independent tech and political news site, aNewDomain.net[65] Pournelle served as director of aNewDomain until his death.

[66] After 1998, Pournelle maintained a website with a daily online journal, "View from Chaos Manor," a blog dating from before the use of that term.

He said he resists using the term "blog" because he considered the word ugly, and because he maintained that his "View" is primarily a vehicle for writing rather than a collection of links.

[71] Pournelle was later named Executive Assistant to the Mayor in charge of research in September 1969, but resigned from the position after two weeks.

[72] After leaving Yorty's office, in 1970 he was a consultant to the Professional Educators of Los Angeles (PELA), a group opposed to the unionization of school teachers in LA.

"[74] Pournelle resisted others classifying him into any particular political group, but acknowledged the approximate accuracy of the term paleoconservatism as applying to him.

According to a Wall Street Journal article, "Pournelle estimates that for what the Iraq war has cost so far, the United States could have paid for a network of nuclear power stations sufficient to achieve energy independence, and bankrupt the Arabs for once and for all.

[citation needed] James Wheatfield wrote that "Pournelle delights in setting up complex background situations and plots, leading the reader step by step towards a solution which is the very opposite of politically correct and… defying a dissenting reader to find where in this logical chain he or she would have acted differently.

[86] Some of Pournelle's standard themes that recur in the stories are: welfare states become self-perpetuating, building a technological society requires a strong defense and the rule of law, and "those who forget history are condemned to repeat it".