Timothy Lynch

I'll write a short blog entry now since it's late.

When I was finishing up college, I happened upon Usenet. These were so-called "newsgroups" that contained very little news. Prior to ubiquitous spamming and prior to the AOL newbies flooding Usenet, Usenet use to have discussions broken up into subject area.

One newsgroup of note was the Star Trek newsgroup, which mainly discussed Star Trek: The Next Generation. This show started around 1988 and lasted for 7 seasons.

Three of the more famous reviewers of the group were Atsushi Kanamori, Michael Rawdon, and Tim Lynch, from progressively pessimistic about TNG to progressively optimistic (there were a few other reviewers, but those come to mind).

Tim and I both went to Cornell, but we didn't know each other. He majored in physics, and I in EE and CS. He went to Caltech for grad school in physics before dropping out to teach. I think he continues to teach at a private school in California to this day.

It was interesting reading the reviews because TNG was the only decent science fiction series of the day. Babylon 5 wasn't out yet, and many of the less than memorable SF series had yet to make it. Perhaps the fans thought too much of how good the show was. It lacked the kind of emotional sophistication of the new Battlestar Galactica, but still had a few gems as stories.

I haven't read some of these reviews for maybe 10+ years, so it's nostalgic looking back at Tim's old reviews. I wonder what he thinks of them now, and his role in a period of time before the Web became the behemoth it is now.