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Tell HN: Bob Cringely has died
945 points by paveworld 8 days ago | 221 comments
I heard from a friend of the family that Bob passed away in his sleep early Saturday. Very sad news. Bob, who's real name was Mark Stevens, was an early employee of Apple and was best known for his PBS documentaries, especially "Triumph of the Nerds". He will be missed.
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I liked his "Plane Crazy: Building a Plane in 30 Days" on PBS.

Watching him try (and fail) to build a composite airplane says so much about the allure of modern techniques (I won't spoil the end, but old-school gets the last laugh). I've been less than enthusiastic about modern composites ever since seeing this show.

Bob's attempt (and short temper) reveals a good deal of hubris on his part.

The documentary is a fascinating failure and a masterclass in attempting to salvage a show when the whole premise for the show completely collapses.

[1] https://youtu.be/FSNzF-KSGiw


This is an amazing show.

If you're familiar with it, maybe you could answer one question: Cringely sourced a lot of the materials and know-how for the plane from American companies and workers. Would that be possible today?


>> Cringely sourced a lot of the materials and know-how for the plane from American companies and workers. Would that be possible today?

One stop shopping: https://www.aircraftspruce.com/


Yes, there are quite a few American companies making light sport and experimental aircraft, they are just very small and cater to a mostly wealthy hobby market. Lots of composites still being made here as well.

Thanks for mentioning that, I hadn't seen any of his non-tech stuff before and it's a great watch. Even knowing absolutely nothing about building airplanes, it had me yelling "what the hell are you doing" as the events unfold. Everyone he talks to keeps saying that it can't be done and he goes for it anyway only to realize that they were all right. Even though the actual project is an abject failure it's still very entertaining.

I found a better rip of the documentary midway through this archive.org upload of off-air PBS recordings from North Carolina: https://archive.org/details/unc-tv-1997-vhs-720p-60 . It took like an hour to download and the tape hiss was pretty bad, so I ran it through Final Cut Pro's audio denoising filter and reuploaded it to Youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqxU4nnLkeA


Thank you for doing that. I’m going to go watch it now!

You can compare that to a group of teams competing to build a plane from "scrap", which did succeed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTjBBHxDBv0

(Of course in "Scrapheap challenge" the junk is carefully seeded with appropriate parts, so we can all argue about how realistic it is. But it was lovely to see the teams build things that actually got off the ground regardless.)


Wow, I have a hazy memory of seeing this when I was a kid. Shocked I would ever see this again on HN of all places.

> Shocked I would ever see this again on HN of all places

Wouldn't HN be one of the most likely places?


Watching now… wow what a throw back. Got a kick out of the 90s PBS vibe and the Chicago news! Thanks for posting

thanks for posting <3 this is great

Yup, saw this vid decades ago. It still seems like yesterday.

"Watching him try (and fail) to build a composite airplane "

But the plane did fly.


> I love how after the debacle of Bob trying to make his own plane, the producers had to salvage the entire production by buying him a kit plane and filming him hang out a few hours at the factory acting like he was actually building the thing when really he was just getting in the way of the workers while grandstanding

The top comment lays it out as it is, lmao. And it was far more than 30 days as well.


Damn. I've loved Bob and his writings ever since I read Accidental Empires as a kid. He went through some crazy shit over the last few years (lost his house, almost blind). And when he started blogging again this year (https://www.cringely.com/2026/05/27/where-the-heck-have-i-be...), the stories got even worse (lost his son, heart attack, stroke). RIP.

He went through some crazy shit over the last few years (lost his house, almost blind)

https://www.jeremyreimer.com/rockets-item.lsp?f=true&p=272 makes it sound like the "crazy shit over the last few years" wasn't rue.

The post makes a strong case that the cataracts story and the losing his house story were false, among others.

If you're wondering why someone would make things like this up, it appears that they were cover stories for his Mineserver Kickstarter never shipping despite him saying "[i]n terms of development, this project was almost finished before the Kickstarter campaign began", "[a]ll these Mineservers will ship this week. Software is complete and SD cards are being duplicated. T-shirts are being printed every night", etc.

If it sounds unbelievable that someone would make these things up to have something to blame for a failed kickstarter, I recommend reading the post. The evidence against the house burning down is hard to argue with (later Google Maps/Street View imaging shows no apparent damage, in a later post he accidentally revealed that he used the exact laptop that he said he replaced because it was lost in the fire) and there's even stronger evidence that a number of his other claims are fabricated.


The cataract story and the house story are absolutely true. It is also true that the kids' kickstarter project failed, as most do. Mark Stephens did have a heart attack and stroke, his 21 year old son Cole did die unexpectedly in his sleep in April and sadly, on Saturday, so did Mark.

I don't know who Jeremy Reimer is, but he needs another hobby.


"his 21 year old son Cole did die unexpectedly in his sleep in April"

I never said that I thought otherwise, nor did I reference Cole in my linked article, and the comment you replied to didn't mention Cole either.


Yes I also found that odd. Particularly because it's a common rhetorical tactic to mislead by redirecting focus away from uncomfortable questions to more defensible claims (which also evokes sympathy in this case).

Also, a new account with only one comment

Thanks for that link. Completely changed my feelings about the guy, unfortunately for the worse, but in the end it's better to know.

That kind of lying is what I sometimes expect from children under 10, it's shocking to me that an adult with some manner of family and career would behave in such a way, in so public a manner.

Actually Mark Stephens did die from his previous med conditions.

It sounds like you have some kind of other confirmation for this? Anything I can find online points to this HN post, which is "heard from a friend of the family". You couldn't rely on the guy to be telling you the truth so confirmation of the death using one of his pseudonyms isn't even close to official.

Looks like wikipedia won't allow a death date on his page yet anyway.


At the time of posting, there was no other confirmation. But a very brief obituary was posted today: https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/name/mark-stephens-obit...

> I was the chief architect, in over my head despite starting at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab back in 1978.

I used to read his articles back a decade ago. I really enjoyed them. This quote from the article resonated with me. It’s a sobering feeling having dedicated a career to the field to struggle keeping up.

RIP. He seemed to face a lot of struggles both physically and emotionally towards the end of his life.


"The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) has been a center of excellence for Artificial Intelligence research, teaching, theory, and practice since its founding in 1963."

https://ai.stanford.edu/


I misread his quote as him starting the lab as opposed to starting AT the lab.

Reminded me of John C Dvorak, same generation, had a heart attack in April then died in July...

I didn't know about Dvorak's passing. I have read so many things he wrote, same for Robert X Cringely. Back in the heyday of the pc and the early internet, I loved reading their latest stuff. Cringely in PC Week or something similar. Those were happy days, I was just a programmer at one of the big companies of the day.

I loved his kind of cringe worthy references to his paramour, Pam or Pammy I think. That was a simpler time, a more optimistic time.


I read InfoWorld for its entire run, from when it was on newsprint in the 80s. Is there anyplace to read a true and complete history of the Cringely column? As I recall, I thought of this guy as 'not Cringely'. I'm happy to be corrected, but there was more than one Cringely. As I recall, there was even a lawsuit over rights to the name.

I just found at the bottom of this Cringely website info page, he says there were indeed more than one person calling themselves Cringely. And he was writing for InfoWorld, not PC Week.

https://www.cringely.com/bout-bob/

"Through a cruel twist of fate having to do with federal judges and unscrupulous lawyers there is, for the moment, more than one Robert X. Cringely. You are right now reading the one true Cringely, author, raconteur, TV personality, and pizza delivery specialist."


I hope they're both sitting and reading and learning together now, wherever they may be. I never caught this update but remember thinking about what he was up to some year ago, really sad all around. Rest in peace and I hope they're both remembered for a long time, I sure will.

This is heart breaking. I can't imagine going through all of this. I wish the best for his family now <3

Mark was an incredibly smart educated and talented guy. His passing will be missed by his followers most certainly.

Jesus. That is gut wrenching.

It would be, if they were true. The guy was a pathological liar.

Whoa, really?

Yes, really. But he had a lot of people that took it as gospel and he did motivate a lot of people to go into tech. Mixed bag.

He was a very entertaining blogger! RIP.

However, he was also ripping people off and making up stuff: https://www.jeremyreimer.com/rockets-item.lsp?f=true&p=272


It was his kids running a Mineserver Kickstarter. If you fund a bunch of kids on Kickstarter never seeing a finished project are very high. Cringely and his kids obviously made a good faith effort.

Read the linked article.

It is OK to fail. It is not OK to continuously lye to people who have provided you with money (or anyone else for that matter).


Yeah when you have backers imploring you to just admit defeat honestly, you’ve reached a whole different level of Kickstarter failure

I am surprised at how many I have funded and have made it across the finish line.

But similar to the mineserver, I lost $65 on this thing as it went quiet in 2020. It seemed like they were moving forwards but a few dud manufacturing runs combined with Covid problems just meant the whole project just folded. But I have had like a 90% success ratio so I will take the occasional loss. I am still amazed I got my Ouya!

https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop


Rest in peace Robert X. Cringely. For those interested, the documentary "Triumph of the Nerds" is available on the Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/triumph_of_the_nerds

I first learned of the concept of “buffer bloat” from him, and how artificially limiting your upload bandwidth a bit can avoid huge lag spikes https://www.cringely.com/2011/01/04/2011-predictions-one-wor...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmbrFFP7bXU

Here's a fun clip. I think this company is the one which eventually became the one behind the excite search engine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf4SKkTEkfU

I think this is also a clip from the same documentary. We had to watch this as part of IT class in high school, everyone laughed pretty hard


Also highly recommend watching Nerds 2.0.1 - A Brief History Of The Internet as well: https://archive.org/details/nerds-2.0.1-a-brief-history-of-t...

I loved this documentary. It really captured what I loved about this job.

Same here. I found it highly inspiring as a young developer. Whenever I lacked motivation in my career, I would rewatch it.

Around the time that Triumph of the Nerds came out in 1995 I saw the segment in which Cringely introduces the audience to someone he builds up as "the most dangerous man in Silicon Valley" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kP15q-s1yMM . When it was revealed to be Steve Jobs I—a teenage Macintosh fanboy!—thought "what, that has-been? How ridiculous."

His wife was working for Apple at the time, and if she wasn't actually reporting to Jobs, she certainly had...encounters with him.

Not to be confused as the other Triumph of the Attack of the Clones and Nerd of the Rings:

https://youtu.be/YKT7bx-fmtk?t=77


Might as well throw Revenge of the Nerds on the “avoid confusion with” pile, lol

I was a big fan of this guy's work. Great documentaries. Triumph of the Nerds was a great watch — I gifted this to several people. I also watch the lost Steve Jobs documentary every few years for inspiration. Accidental Empires was a great read — I always think of Larry Ellison doing the NYT Crossword puzzle when I read about all the Paramount drama. He'll be missed.

I remember watching "Triumph of the Nerds" as a appx. 10 year old (it aired some years later in Norway). Two quotes stuck with me from that. The first is Ballmer mocking IBMers for bragging about how many KLOCs they had written every day. He's point being that the code is not the product. The other was Ellison complaining about the software distribution models at the time. "Don't put software on plastic discs, plastic discs in cardboard box, cardboard box in a warehouse and later in a store. Instead put the software on the net." I remember calculating how long it would be to download the full Windows 95 disc on my 28.8 modem, and thinking that it would be long time until that was feasible.

A shame. I encountered his work in a couple of places (with the caveat that I don't know which Cringely was which):

PBS website: He wrote a column that their site no longer hosts, but the Wayback Machine has it snapshotted frequently, including just after his final submission for the outlet in 2008: https://web.archive.org/web/20081223220604/http://www.pbs.or...

NerdTV: In an era of nascent web video, he produced long-form video interviews with tech types, and clipped what might now be called "Shorts/Tiktoks" from the conversations, pulling out the of "the juicy bit" and "the nerdy bit". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NerdTV (h/t to u/Keyframe)

And obliquely, Cringely's columns or videos were the first place I recall hearing about foveated approaches to video compression for streaming. I thought it sounded like a terrible idea, but I guess Valve delivered, 20 years on, using the technique to good effect with the Steam Frame. Chalk one up for Cringely; RIP.


Incredibly sad news. I first learned of him and watched his documentaries just a few years ago. It’s difficult to understate, if you happen to be a tech nerd, how much fun “Triumph of the Nerds” and “Nerds 2.0.1” are to watch, even nowadays.

Definitely. His book "Accidental Empires" (subtitled "How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date") is also an incredibly fun read, and a glimpse into a lost era. If anyone likes the true story of the guy sneaking into vintage Apple to develop Graphing Calculator out of pure passion, you'll love Accidental Empires.

(Just realized I've never read the 1996 update/revision. Adding it to the top of my list.)


"overstate"

Maybe they meant it wasn’t at all fun. Likely incorrect, but never assume.

nonsense

When searching to verify the veracity of this, this post made me laugh: https://www.cringely.com/2020/01/23/not-dead-yet-what-bob-cr... (Circa 2020).

Cool story but after doing some digging it’s likely not true.

https://www.jeremyreimer.com/rockets-item.lsp?f=true&p=272


Everyone should read the above. Cringely had so many stories where he seemed to be part of, or present to witness, significant events in the computer industry - after a while you become suspicious that one person could really do/see all these things. Like he was a 'Forrest Gump' of technology.

This happens in first episode of recent East of Eden adaptation when Cyrus Trask claims to have been at all the major Civil War battles.

Sounds more like Woody Allen's 'Zelig'.

I really liked the guy, and his speculations about IBM.

But it's wild to get involved in a Kickstarter involving the star of Plane Crazy. When I watched Kickstarters fail and the people who started them grow increasingly unstable, I would always think about Plane Crazy.

Too bad that it didn't get a lot of distribution; there's a link on this HN thread pointing to a copy on youtube that was taped off PBS in Chicago, and I literally saw it on WTTW in Chicago. I don't know where it could really be marketed - it might be great to reedit it into a feature.

But its theme is that Cringely would bite off more than he can chew during what one might not recognize as a mania. You would see this pattern in almost everything he did, unless he was lucky enough to get it right on the first try.

1) he would make a lot of promises based on a dream of accomplishing something that no one had ever done before,

2) experts he would consult would tell him that they didn't think it was possible, but that they'd be happy to be surprised,

3) as the problems would pile up and he would gradually come to the realization that he was going to fail, he would first look at those problems as interesting challenges,

4) improvise inadequate solutions to show he could meet those challenges,

5) ignore the experts who criticize those inadequate solutions, and that tell him that these were the problems that made them think this was impossible in the first place,

6) mock and attack the experts who criticized his inadequate solutions (likely as stuck in the past or jealous of a non-expert invading their turf),

7) then start to conceal new and compounding problems,

8) then fully and knowingly lie about the problems (likely justified to himself as simply buying time for one fix he's obsessing upon to work),

9) then start to blame people who don't believe those lies for inadequately supporting him (he just needs a little bit more time),

10) then attack those people - his investors, friends and family (I just need another day or two!),

11) then attack himself for being low enough to attack the people who believe in him and love him,

12) then consider suicide.

Have there been any "Plane Crazy"-style documentaries about any of the spectacular Kickstarter failures?


The weird thing is that a lot of people that are ultimately successful share a lot of these traits. But I think the big differentiator is in how you deal with any of them, you can have the trait of not immediately rolling over when an expert says something can't be done. That's fine. But if ultimately you can't do it either you simply admit the experts were right after all and you move on. The further down the list you go the bigger the success if you eventually do manage to deliver, but the bigger the loss if you don't.

Where Cringely went from interesting to a risk to himself and others is where he refused to stay connected to reality.

I can relate: I start a lot of projects where I'm usually in over my head. But I always learn, sometimes learn a lot and some of those projects eventually do work out. But I don't have my ego invested in any project and I think that is one of the bigger differences, some stuff works and is obvious, some stuff could work and is not obvious, some stuff can't work but it is not obvious (to me at least) and some stuff simply can't work and it is obvious. The third category is where you lose the money, the second is where you make it, the dividing line between the two will give you Theranos, UBeam and Moller on one side of the line and CISCO on the other.


So 12 hours later (or so), there's still no confirmation that he actually died.

Unfortunate, but an excellent moral story about how lies can snowball quickly.

This absolutely needs to be read by anyone here speaking of this man like some kind of tech god

He was a gossip, gadfly, observer, and tinkerer who also wrote well (for his audience).

Like Dvorak and others, twas just a bit of entertainment, until it wasn't.

Thoroughly enjoyed his works (warts and all), learned a few things, and remain deeply disappointed that NerdTV didn't become a thing.

RIP


Makes me wonder if he's actually dead...

The Jason Arday of technology columnists.

Still no confirmation or obituary.

A brief obituary was posted today: https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/name/mark-stephens-obit...

And previously this: https://www.cringely.com/2013/04/07/cringely-comes-back-from...

This is a famous documentary from him: https://youtu.be/toSRmKKiosQ?is=kj1fkHSfpGsLoBVf

I loved the book Accidental Empires, and it inspired me to become a programmer. RIP Bob. You were the best.

For historical technology, one of the must reads along with Soul of a New Machine and Hackers

+1. 38 year old now, probably read it when I was 10. And it still has a special place in my heart, I was just thinking about picking up a copy last week. RIP.

Sad to hear that, apart things already mention I'd like to point out his NerdTV interviews - especially Dan Drake one (Autodesk co-founder). I always suspected, but that interview kind of validated how Autodesk went after competition as a strategy (to buy them outright). You can watch them all here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NerdTV

Interesting! I actually work at Autodesk and my job is mainly to help users of acquired product A move over to (also) acquired product B (product B was previously a competitor of product A). I guess this acquisition culture must’ve been around long before me!

What’s that job role titled? I’m looking for work and that seems like something I could be okay at, and likely in demand enough to offer realistic prospects. Thanks in advance.

I had thought he had passed away earlier this year, but it was John C. Dvorak, who wrote the Infoworld industry news column before (/contemporaneously with) Mark Stephens, who adopted the name Robert X. Cringely. https://www.wired.com/1998/12/cringely/

John Dvorak passed July 20, 2026 Mark Stephens/Robert X. Cringely October 3, 2026


Just to confirm ... this Bob Cringely?

https://www.cringely.com/bout-bob/


A sad irony in the title of one of his last blog posts, "Not dead yet! What Bob Cringely has been up to…". https://www.cringely.com/2020/01/23/not-dead-yet-what-bob-cr...

Previously: https://www.cringely.com/2013/04/07/cringely-comes-back-from...

I never read this dude’s stuff but by golly is it just stuffed with humanity. I feel like I’m talking with the man reading these.

It would be quite an encore if he pulled this off one last time.

Yes. RIP.

His “Lost Interview” with Steve is incredible.

Listening to Steve talk about the benefits of object oriented programming is something else


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs:_The_Lost_Interview

Thinks he's talking about all his best work in the past. Is actually talking about the foundations for all his best work still to come.

He's even doubtful about whether to talk about NEXT at all, as though it really isn't comparatively significant.


RIP. Damn and Dvorak died earlier this year? What a sad year for legendary computer columnists.

It's a pity that new media has never really thrown up a replacement for those sort of columnists, isn't it? Negroponte in Wired, Douglas Adams in MacUser, and (slightly more obscure!) Dave Langford's work in various Amstrad PCW magazines in the UK.

Slashdot did experiment a little with Jon Katz, most notably his 'Voices from the Hellmouth' series, but he was never really aiming to sound the same note of wry detachment as those magazine greats.

It's a pity - I'd rather read a monthly column of that sort than any amount of pointless bickering on Twitter.


To quote Fran Lebowtiz "A great audience is more important for the creation of great art than great artists are"... We've lost a great, ironic, self aware informed commentariat because a literate, emotionally stable audience for long form content has shrunk. Which means the work isn't there (or at least isn't distributed beyond a few substacks), to perpetuate and expand that audience.

I see the same effect all the time in fiction. Innovative challenging books don't get published (or even picked up by agents), because the publishing industry is run by the kind of people who are frightened and offended by such books. Which means the audience for those books become only those lucky enough to be exposed to older, denser, more innovative fiction - which invariably shrinks.


You've had this fragmentation of attention. Many of the main computer magazines had essentially destination columnists whether writing under their own name or a pseudonym--which periodically passed to a new writer (which in Cringely's case was a matter of some controversy at one point). The latter were often written in a sort of gossipy style intended to make the reader feel that they had an inside view of a company or an area of technology.

It was a different time.


Exactly - these were essentially celebrity gossip columns - I was fond of his - but even more "had-to-read-every-month" was his "PC/Computing" column - which was never about PC's, nor computing - IIRC, it was mostly about Uma Thurman. (IIRC, it was almost as much as an obsession as Tarantino's...)

not "his" PC/Computing column, Penn Jillette's... ugh

Aah! Don't make me worried about Langford!

He appears to be fine, and just published Ansible® 471: https://news.ansible.uk/a471.html


Om too. Bad year.

Was going to say exactly this. They were the most independent of thinkers in the industry

My favourite article he wrote was "Stranger in a Strange Land", about Homer Sarasohn (not Deming) rebuilding the Japanese electronics industry -- and to some extent, culture! -- after the war.

https://web.archive.org/web/20001015151303/http://www.pbs.or...


Thank you! I just read it and can’t help but seeing the exact same story played out in Apple in China.

You can ask you favorite LLM to compare the parallels; I did and it was enlightening.


I remember religiously reading his Infoworld columns back in the day.

I followed his column, I seem to recall the last one was about helping his kid build a minecraft server.

I hope Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson cover his passing, they knew him.

twit dot tv


All of the early 90s were colored with his take on things.

I truly enjoyed his Triumph of the Nerds. I thought he had a pretty good handle on tech and looked forward to his opinion pieces. He regularly had a different take on tech, which helped to broaden my views. RIP, you will be missed.

Huge influence on my youth. He seemed like the inconvenient insider of 90s Silicon Valley. Like a PBS-trained version of pud.

Ah man there is a blast from the past. Fucked Company was so interesting and entertaining at the time.

RIP

as a non-pure engineer: I, Cringely helped me so much


Sad.

Early employee at Apple who was offered to be paid in stock. He “held out for the cash”.

I really like the triumph of the nerds series. Getting bill Gates, Balmer, Jobs and those IBMers to explain how it all came together and how MS who didn’t have an OS ended up getting one to sell to IBM.

The transcripts are a good

https://www.pbs.org/nerds/transcript.html


There's no evidence he ever worked for Apple beyond his own word, and he sure did tell a lot of tall tales.

He traded early Apple stock for cash? Oh, there aren't many acts so foolish in hindsight.

Offered to be paid with stock, took the cash. As someone who’s first startup is no long in business, and having cash in hand is appealing..

But yeah..

“well for a short time I was an employee of Apple Computer, employee number 12 and one day I helped move materials out of this garage. At the time Steve Jobs said that the company was short of loot so he offered to pay me in company shares, but I held out for the money - my mother still reminds me of that incident.”


Daniel Kottke was Employee #12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kottke

Cringely says here that he worked part-time at Apple for a few months as a graduate student: https://www.pbs.org/nerds/qa4.html . Mark Stephens was at Stanford at the time (he earned his master's in communication in 1979) so this lines up. I think it's entirely possible that Cringely/Stephens was in fact the 12th person hired by Apple, but didn’t get a formal employee number because he wasn't a full-time employee.

But Cringely stated on Triumph of the Nerds that he was literally "Employee #12". Other than this statement of his, there are no other sources to confirm that this was true. There's a very comprehensive list of early Apple employees with evidence to back them up here: https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_early_Apple_Computer_e...

Mark Stephens does not appear anywhere in this list, nor have any other early employees confirmed that he worked there.

Yes, this might have just been a small slip-up on Cringely's part, but the trouble is that he continued to make claims about being employed by Apple that were clearly fabricated. For example, Cringely claimed to have invented the Lisa's trash can icon in this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06M64l7pPIk&t=373s but if you read about the same story from other Apple employees, they don't mention him at all: https://folklore.org/Rosings_Rascals.html

These "tall tales" start to add up, and it becomes very hard to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Cringely was a great writer, a great documentarian, and really wonderful at finding the human stories behind the giants of the personal computer industry. Unfortunately, he also often made up stories about himself that were later found to be untrue. He didn't need to do this, because his work stood on its own. It was just a flaw in his personality.

In any case, this is sad news. Rest in peace, Mark Stephens.


That's fair, there's some other stuff that he seems to have verifiably lied about. There's the Lisa stuff you mention, and he lied about being a professor at Stanford when in reality he was either a TA or one level above a TA (sort of like Lex Fridman and MIT). I'm not sure that he'd lie altogether about being an early Apple employee when he was presenting a show that interviewed both Jobs and Wozniak (who would likely see the show and know that he was lying), but who knows.

You might already know this because you seem to know a lot about him, but when I was researching the Lisa claim you brought up I found a CHM oral history with Dan'l Lewin (https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...), where page 20 mentions that Cringely was married to Ellen Nold while she was working on the Lisa project. Maybe that's how he got some of his anecdotes about Apple in the early 80s. EDIT: Cringely's next Apple anecdote in the talk you linked was about AppleLink, and this photo has Nold listed as manager of support programs for AppleLink: https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/ellen-nold-the...

I agree that his tendency to exaggerate his own past is unfortunate but doesn't outweigh all the great journalism he's done.


Hindsight is a whole other country.

He just lied about that.

I've got fond memories of reading "The Little Engine That Could", his article on the wonders of mesh networking, potentially cheaply by flashing Linksys WRT54G with OpenWRT

>...the WRT54G with Sveasoft firmware is all you need to become your cul de sac's wireless ISP. Going further, if a bunch of your friends in town had similarly configured WRT54Gs, they could seamlessly work together and put out of business your local telephone company.

https://web.archive.org/web/20040608142623/http://www.pbs.or...


His written blog of his long-distance ISP trials and tribulations are one of the many things that inspired me into digital radio/comms and even getting my HAM license a couple of years ago.

Reading accidental empires is how i learned that the tech industry even existed

Same, that was my introduction to ‘tech culture’.

Future generations will have a better understanding of the personalities and history of the personal computer industry because of his work.

I remember in the very early days of ZeroTier him stopping by our tiny coworking office in SoCal (we weren't scattered all over yet). He said it piqued his interest because it was "something that should have been built 10 or 15 years ago." (I'm paraphrasing. This was around 2015.)

He belongs to the old Silicon Valley. I wasn't there in those days and have never lived there, but I miss it.

It was back when SV was genuinely creative and largely positive in its attitude toward people and the future. It emerged from the ethos of places like SRI's "augmented human intelligence" lab and things like the Whole Earth Catalog and the Homebrew Computer Club.

Of course I'm well aware of the other origin story, the one that goes back to WWII and the defense industry. They're both true in different ways, but I think the ideas I mentioned above were the ones that came to dominate for a while.

I'd say until the mid-late 2000s.

I have this goofy speculation that the old Silicon Valley more or less went bankrupt in the dot.com crash in 2001. After that it was bought out and taken over by different interests with different goals. Probably bullshit, but it'd make a good novel plot or something.


> Probably bullshit

FWIW, there is truth to what you're talking about.

I lived in (Los Gatos for a while) and around (Marin County for a while) SV during parts of the mid to late 1990s (into the very early 2000s) and the culture there was tech focused in a much more pure way than what came later.

Idealist 80s-90s hacker culture kids mixed with some older progressive graybeard types. Lots of people who learned how to code on their own using C64s or Apple IIs as teens and followed that into tech careers and were just happy to make a living doing what they would otherwise do for free.

Toward the end of the original dot-com boom and especially after it that culture got scattered to the winds by the influx of the finance bro types who had no particular love for tech but for the fact that everyone then saw it as the way to get rich.

I'm sure there was a different SV before my time there, and probably also somewhat parallel to my time there (just in different bubbles) but the place that I imagine that you imagine did exist for a while, I saw it in person.


Internship in San Jose, 1991. Back when I thought I'd have a software career. Decades later, worked in every part of IT except software, but I don't think I'd want to change anything for the world. Met some amazing people.

Damn those were good days.


Well said

Somebody who has chronicled and commented on the business for a long time. I enjoyed his work, and chuckled at some of the for-and-against it caused. Sorry to hear and I hope his family is ok. There’s a whole lotta water that’s passed under the bridge that we’ve not really noticed.

Loved his book, and documentary.

BTW, there are 2 "Robert X. Cringely", one owned by InfoWorld, one owned by Mark Stephens.

https://www.wired.com/1998/12/cringely/


I want to offer my condolences to his family and business partner(s). I read his columns for many years. Loved his style and smarts. I particularly enjoyed reading some of the comments and his answers, often as enlightening as the column itself. This sudden death could happen to me, so I am more appreciative of being alive today.

As far as I've been able to find, this is the last thing that Bob Cringely wrote publicly, 79 days before he passed away:

https://www.cringely.com/2026/07/16/the-auditors-opinion/


_Triumph of the Nerds_ was what got me interested in pursuing a career in software. It is the one documentary that's had the biggest influence on my life. I still have the VHS recording of it when it first aired on PBS in 1995. Even though it's on YouTube, I'll find my VCR and watch my old recording every few years.

In 2012, I saw a screening of _Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview_[1] in San Francisco when it was released in theaters, and subsequently bought the DVD a few years ago. Highly recommend it if you like _Triumph of the Nerds_.

RIP Bob

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs%3A_The_Lost_Intervi...


I remember watching him on PBS. There was something great about turning on the TV and finding someone who thought computers, and the people behind them, were interesting enough to spend a whole evening on. Sorta rare at that time.

Damn. I've been re-watching his documentaries recently. He was one of the greats.

Ah man...

Hadn't heard from him in years. Then he posted that he was going to start writing again and I was so very glad to hear it... And now...

The dude was to me what tech journalism was. Between Cringely and Dvorak leaving us, we're losing the old guard. I'm bummed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48236501


Oh man this is really sad to me. End of an Era. His documentaries fueled me so much in the 90s and 2000s. I loved his stuff and his blogs.

Did an amazing job documenting the computer revolution and the internet revolution.


Oh man...this one hit me tonight! I remember watching Triumph of the Nerds in high school and loving every second of it! I read his column on PBS for years and followed him to his blog later...and kinda fell off as I fell off of so many things. Bob was influential in turning my childhood passion for computers into my career.

It's especially tragic for his family as Bob had announced that his son Cole, aged 21, had passed away back in April. Condolences to all those who knew Mark, Cole, and their loved ones. RIP.


Just read that here. So sad, tragic.

https://www.cringely.com/2026/05/27/where-the-heck-have-i-be...


Triumph of the Nerds and Pirates of Silicon Valley is what convinced me to actually pursue software as a career. It was so hugely influential.

> Pirates of Silicon Valley

I have rewatched this movie so many times and it was definitely one of the most formative movies for me as well.

(basically because every afternoon or most afternoon if there was no satellite connection I think, I would watch the movie and this was one of the only movies within the pen drives that I had I think.)

When I was in 5-6th grade, I even gave a speech in class about Steve jobs to one of the subjects which was more about personal development/personal trainer. The sir actually used to call me steve jobs afterwards for sometime whenever I used to meet him.

Man do I love pirates of the silicon valley, I really like this song[0]

and random trivia about this song, and that the director of the movie even commented on this song/youtube video (as the video is actually named: "What is the name of this music?") and it turns out that this is an unnamed song.

> As well as using a lot of 70's & 80's classic rock and roll classics appropriate to the era when Jobs and Woz were starting Apple, we also went for "sound-alikes" (for the Ella Fitzgerald number) and created some of our own music. This piece is one of those creations. There is no name for it that I'm aware of.

> Martyn Burke

> Director-Pirates of Silicon Valley

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wm7btLayRZ4


https://www.cringely.com/bout-bob/

  On How You Can Reach Him to Tell Him He’s a Dipstick
  Robert X. Cringely
  (707) 525-9519
  (707) 525-9517 (fax)
  bob@cringely.com

  Bob, bob, bob...you freeeeking dipstick.
  You're not supposed to die that young. That wasn't part of the deal.

one of his articles that i read that i remember came out in July 2003 titled "The son of napster" [https://web.archive.org/web/20040619084432/http://www.pbs.or...].

Had to login to pay my respects. His blog "this rag" as he used to call it was foundational in my professional life. And I still typed cringley.com by hand to read his posts. He had a several tragedies in his life... But now his soul can be with his children.

RIP hacker from a bygone era..


Rest in peace Bob. One of the great early tech writers. The feeling of his writing -- the blend of fact and opinion and sense of humor, and more than anything the sense the really cared -- always felt to me like one of the seeds that developed into the blogosphere.

It seems this news is not yet verified and I can't find it anywhere other than hackernews and a Threads thread that links to here. We must wait independent confirmation. But condolences if true of course.

His death was far too early. It's hard to explain how much influence Cringely had over the years, how many minds were influenced by him - and how much his humor has been assimilated into the tech industry. He will be missed.

I greatly enjoyed his book Accidental Empires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_Empires

My last memory of him writing was he claimed he has definitive authoritative inside info that Google was going to start charging up to a $1 for each search request on the website.

His documentary gave me a kind of access to Apple, a company I loved dearly as a kid, even as it was dying. Like WarGames, it seemed impossible to me all of its footage existed. I’m a stranger indebted. RIP.

> even as it was dying

There was a lot of that, last century. Made being an Apple developer challenging. We would suffer torrents of abuse (the current Apple hate is almost quaint, compared to that).

I enjoyed his writing, but there was always a lot of showmanship and posturing, so it was hard to take seriously. For me, it was entertainment.

I'm quite sad to hear of his personal travails.


Ragebaiting people online before it was cool?

If true, this is very sad. I’ve read Cringely’s work for around 20 years — not as long as some here, I’m sure — and always appreciated the perspective of someone who had been involved in the industry in some capacity since the beginning.

Unfortunately, the site became more difficult to read in later years when it turned out that a lot of what he was saying was evidently false. Even more so when he switched over to AI-generated content.

Still, Triumph is an amazing documentary that I’ve watched many, many times.


Dang - black ribbon please

I all Bob would do would be writing Accidental Empires, and inspiring Simon Wardly to adapt his Commandos, Infantry and Police into Pioneers, Settlers and Town planners framework, it would still be enough to achieve immortality. Thank you, Bob!

https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-to...


De mortuis and all that, but someone has pointed out the poor track record of his later initiatives and I think the reasons for those failures are an important part of the picture. Look at his last few blog posts, outlining a radical alternative to LLMs. Read closely, and at the heart of that idea we find "assume enterprise search". But the willingness to consider radical alternatives is part of the right way to think.

I don't really understand what your comment is trying to say, but I read through the last few pages of his blog and all the posts after the first one from 2026 announcing his return seem AI generated. I think it's a shame, as I loved his writing style in "Accidental Empires" and in his earlier blog posts and columns. It's strange to me that someone who had spent most of his life writing either didn't notice or didn't care about the drop in quality from using LLMs to write.

> Look at his last few blog posts, outlining a radical alternative to LLMs. Read closely, and at the heart of that idea we find "assume enterprise search".

I found the patent for his company's technology (https://patents.google.com/patent/US20250259069A1). I always have trouble reading patents, but as far as I can tell it's basically a wrapper around commodity LLMs. The reliability improvements come from prompting the LLM to only source its data from an external database that you provide rather than from whatever it was trained on, and from prompting multiple LLMs simultaneously then doing semantic analysis on the responses to make sure they all agree. I imagine that doing this would probably reduce hallucinations, but there's no hard constraint to prevent them entirely and I'm not sure what the moat is.


The nonexistence of that external database is the crucial bit. The enterprise ontology has been the holy grail for decades. That is why I say that he was assuming the hard bit.

>But the willingness to consider radical alternatives is part of the right way to think.

That sounds liked LinkedIn speak.


While that's true, a stopped clock is right twice a day. It can simultaneously sound like LinkedIn speak and be correct.

Don't know, sounds like a total plattitude.

There's no singular "right way to think" that applies in all cases. In many cases thinking of "radical alternatives" can be a bad idea (think people falling for "alternative medicine" stuff). Or some idiot coming up with shitty "radical alternatives" because they can't accept some specific setup or status quo is better - also related to the N.I.H. mindset in software.


Thanks for expanding. That second paragraph is the "meat and potatoes" I was wishing for, while only cautioning that style doesn't necessarily falsify.

Yes I agree. My mind goes back to the Bob Cringely plane documentary recently posted upon the occasion of his sad passing,[0] as a prime example of how someone can elevate radical thinking too far. The Contrarianism Is The Product, essentially, which can be great as a tech writer, but it's lousy for an airplane PM.

You brought the meat! Thanks

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49950029 (missed opportunity for an Ozzy reference, but I didn't watch it all so maybe there's a "Crazy Plane" song later)


This thread is dead, but my point was about radical alternatives to academic fads. These are stickier than most fads -- they typically last a generation to a lifespan, because the only thing that kills them is the death of their believers. And they are always wrong, and absurdly wrong, and destructively wrong. Any alternatives to them are either light paraphrases of them, or else radical; and the radical ones are mostly crank. But the only way to make actual progress is to find the rare radical hypothesis that is not crank, and the only practicable way to do that is to generate more radical hypotheses. (The impracticable approach is to wait for a genius. People have starved to death doing that.)

The rest of the right way to think is the obligation to discard radical hypotheses that don't work out. Visionaries see things that other people don't. Mostly that is because they are not there. Every so seldom, they are.

Sad, and to go in a similar way to his son who he spoke about this year on his site, what are the chances.

A great a free thinker.


Sad to hear this, I watched "Triumph of the Nerds" multiple times when I was at University.

I remember my mother buying me "Accidental Empires" from a bargain bin at the local bookstore as a tween. I must have read it multiple times. Dot product that with "The Cuckoo's Egg" and any technical books and magazines I could get hold of, and you have the formative reading of my career.

Is this confirmed? Wikipedia shows him still alive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_X._Cringely

So far, there is no confirmation other than this Hacker News post. A Wikipedia editor is reverting additions of the news to his biography page until this confirmation arrives.

Update: A brief obituary was posted today. You can read it here: https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/name/mark-stephens-obit...

Wikipedia still does not confirm it (2026/10/07). Further the name used in this OP, "Mark Stevens", does not match his birth name as listed on Wikipedia, "Mark Stephens". Another reply to your question links to an obituary where what details there are seem correct, but there are scant details.

RIP Bob. Triumphs of the Nerds and Accidental Empires captured the time it was written and the future.

Sad news. I’ve read his blog for forever, Bob was a total industry legend. Best wishes to his family

That's sad. I watched the first two parts of Nerds 2.0.1 earlier this year and haven't gotten around to part three. Triumph of the Nerds and Nerds 2.0.1 are a fantastic look at 90's tech. He managed to interview most of the top people.

I liked his frequently contrarian views. Pre-internet his Cringely column (which he took over from someone else) was a great source of information for those of us living far away from Silicon Valley. RIP.

Several someone elses.

This is sad news. I was born in 1989 and thus I don’t remember Cringely’s articles, but I remember watching Triumph of the Nerds in the mid-2000s. I love that documentary; it’s a nice capture of the early days of personal computing and of Silicon Valley culture of the era. I wish there were a follow-up that covered the 2000s and beyond, particularly the rise of social media, the gig economy (Uber, Lyft, AirBNB), cloud computing, big data, cryptocurrency, and generative AI.

This is really sad - Triumph of the Nerds played a big part in my move to California from the East Coast at the beginning of my career in the 1990s and I've rewatched the series regularly ever since... RIP Bob.

What a great storyteller. Im surprised Triumph is mostly forgotten today. I remember being disturbed by his accounting of how Microsoft gave birth to DOS.

Bob was a dear friend and co-conspirator on many an adventure. He and I did everything from moonshots to nano manufacturing. I am shocked to see that he is gone. God speed Bob!

Robert X Bishop


I honestly hadn't heard of him before, and it's sad to be learning about him this way. I'll be watching Triumph of the Nerds tonight. RIP.

First time i’ve heard of bob (born late 90s I guess). Had a great afternoon watching his videos. Thanks for the fun, best wishes to the family.

RIP. I loved Triumph of the Nerds as a teenager.

Dvorak, Om and Robert. Damn. Their takes on tech taught me a lot and shaped how I think about this industry. RIP.

Sad news. Reading his columns post dotcom bubble was always interesting even when I disagreed—which was often!

His takes on IBM were always interesting, especially during that turbulent time with Ginny. He is missed.

He had a real burr in his saddle about IBM. But there were some stories related to Rometty that I initially assumed were at least highly embellished. But people I knew there assured me the reality was as over the top as they sounded.

Very sad news. My VHS box set of "Triumph of the Nerds" resides proudly on my bookshelf.

Triumph of the nerds is the reason I work in high tech. RIP to a legend.

RIP.

I find it sad that he never got rich. Someone so energetic, articulate, and connected with the Who’s Who of Silicon Valley, getting the inside track on everything (especially in his early years), didn’t become fabulously wealthy. There may have been opportunities for him to be an early investor in a meteoric startup, or becoming a co-founder or adviser or board member. But didn’t happen.

That's a bit sad to read, to me he seemed to have been living a very rich life, albeit filled with lots of unfair and sad things happening to him. But seems he got to do what he loved doing, with people he loved, and that's pretty much as rich as you can get in life. Not every one has "make bank account have lots of money" as a priority in life, and if you're aiming for actual happiness, that's probably the way to go, as Cringely has demonstrated to us.

Is getting rich important?

I read Accidental Empires when I was younger, RIP Bob.

Triumph of the Nerds was my introduction to computer history as a kid. I had a dentist that learned I was into computers and he borrowed me his VHS copy. I probably would have had a very different world if I hadn't watched that, because it really turned me on to the potential. Thanks Bob (and my dentist).

Damn, that’s heartbreaking. Rest in peace.

Thats incredibly unfortunate RIP...

I immigrated to the US to work in Silicon Valley directly because of Triumph of the Nerds that I watched in PBS. I have a life that I could never have achieved in my home country and I am grateful to Bob Cringely for this. May he rest in peace.

There now appears to be confirmation of Mark Stephens' passing in the form of an online obituary, here: https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/name/mark-stephens-obit...

I loved "I, Cringely"

May his memory be a blessing

Yeah, "Triumph of the Nerds" was a wonderful adventure. Now, "Triumph of the Lamers" is taking over.

RIP


It is not a good time to be a nerd.

Rest in peace bob...

What?

He was only in his early 70’s.

This hits hard. Bob meant a lot to me I exchanged emails with him back in the 1990s and he gave me advice on a software project.


I’m very sorry to hear. An old copy of Accidental Empires was one of my introductions technology + capitalism

Stephens.

RIP..

Oh no. RIP!!

:(

RIP

That's cringe.

Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_X._Cringely

  Born Mark Stephens 
    January 28, 1953 (age 73)
    Apple Creek, Ohio, U.S.
JUST updated. I had 8 minutes left to edit this.

Died October 3, 2026 (aged 73)


...and the edit wars begin.

Help me out here. I visited Wikipedia to check if the post was real, in this post-truth era. Wikipedia is usually quick to update, but not this time. When it was updated, I had 8 minutes to update my post, which I did.

HN disables edits after one hour, which, in a world of "nothing but change," can make one look mighty foolish, and I have in the past asked for a post to be removed.

I am just puzzled why anyone would downvote a Wikipedia link. Maybe it's because Earth's magnetic poles are reversing. Maybe not.


.

RIP…

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