Quote:
Originally Posted by Eli Bingham
The nostalgia about Jobst is funny. It is totally rad that he inspired Tom Ritchey, yes. And he was a very smart guy. But he was also fairly abrasive on Usenet - sort of an ur-forum bad guy. A sampling:
https://yarchive.net/bike/bicycle_industry.html
This was a classic Usenet "archetype" - the sophisticated curmudgeon. I spent a lot of time on Usenet in the 90s and this sort of thing got pretty old after awhile - I did some of this kind of posting myself, but I was a 16 year old kid and didn't know any better.
The other extremely ironic thing about Jobst and the Radavist is that they're dealing in nostalgia for the time these folks lived and and the equipment that they used, but Jobst was famously hard on equipment, and had almost nothing good to say about the bicycle products of the day. My guess is that if he was around today, doing the same thing, he'd most likely be riding a full suspension e-mtb (and complaining on the Internet about that, too). |
He had an engineer's intolerance for bs, which I appreciated:
"The bike industry is low tech and is driven by fads,
personal quirks and marketing."