Tech Journalist Robert X Cringely Has Died

BoingBoing reports: Mark Stephens, better known under the pen name Robert X. Cringely, died last week at 73. Stephens chronicled the tech industry of the late 1980s and early 1990s — the age of Bill Gates' rise, Steve Jobs' repose, the dawn of the world wide web — and produced the famed documetary Triumph of the Nerds, based on his own bestselling Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date.

Though not the first InfoWorld columnist to write under the Cringely name, he was responsible for its persona and fought successfully to keep it after he left the magazine in 1995.
"I loved the man," writes Darth Technoid (Slashdot reader #83,199): I first met him in the 1990s, while he was still working at InfoWorld, and we became friends immediately. He helped me get a job or two, and he was always filled with crazy (meaning really good) ideas.

I'll miss him and his creativity greatly.
Cringely answered questions from Slashdot's readers in 2000. And Cringely led an interesting life, as you can tell from Slashdot's January, 2020 story Robert Cringely Attempts an Air-Launching Space Startup: "How does a 67-year-old hack with three minor children recover from going blind, losing his home and business in a horrible fire (like 2,000 others, we are still fighting with insurance companies), while appeasing an angry crowd of Kickstarter supporters armed with pitchforks and shovels?"

That crowd still wants long-time tech pundit Robert X. Cringely to deliver on his Kickstarter-funded project to create custom Minecraft servers. So in a new blog post this week, Cringely writes that "I went looking for venture money to recapitalize MineServer and I simultaneously started a satellite launch company to fund my eventual retirement. I am not making this up..."

He's now found a Beverly Hills patron who wants to be a co-investor in the Minecraft servers, but "I will have to earn the matching money on my own, which is what I have been trying to do with my other startup, Eldorado Space."
Slashdot has often linked to Cringely's commentary over the years, as far back as 1998 and as recently as this summer. ("Tech Pundit Cringely Co-Founds Startup '2Brains Inc' to Solve LLM Hallucinations.")

• July, 1999: Cringely's take on "Pirates of Silicon Valley"
• April, 2009: Three Mile Island Memories
• June, 2011: IBM Did Not Invent the Personal Computer
• March, 2019: Cringely's Final Predictions: Apple Becomes a Financial Service and Hedge Fund
• June, 2019: Cringely Predicts The End Of Broadcast TV Within A Decade
• April, 2020: Not Just 'The Death of IT'. Cringely Also Predicts Layoffs For Many IT Contractors
• January, 2021: Robert Cringley Predicted 'The Death of IT' in 2020. Was He Right?
• June, 2023: Cringely Predicts Moore's Law Will Continue — Because of AI

But my favorite Cringely memory is Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview, the full 70-minute interview from 1995 that a 40-year-old Jobs gave to Cringely during filming for Triumph of the Nerds. ("And they actually sent someone to wake up the Pope....") There's various pirated copies on YouTube and an online transcript, but only 10 minutes made the broadcast — at the time Jobs was still at NeXT after his departure from Apple. But when Cringely rediscovered the videotape, the entirety of the interview was released to theaters in 2012 six months after Steve Jobs' death.

Share your own memories of Robert Cringely in the comments...

An American treasure

[memory_register]

He will be missed.

My all-time favorite article of his, from 2004

[SpzToid]

My all-time favorite article of Mr Cringely, from 2004, "How Mom, Pop, and Linux will take down SBC, Verizon, and the rest [linuxdevices.org]" ...which is why my evolved personal infrastructure now involves OpenWRT.

He is already very much missed.

My CORRECTED link to his 2004 article, post-coffee

[SpzToid]

My CORRECTED link to his original article, from 2004.

https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]

Re:My CORRECTED link to his 2004 article, post-cof

[martin-boundary]

Both Cringely but also Jerry Pournelle [wikipedia.org] (Chaos Manor) were inspirations for those of us who used to spend Saturday mornings reading tech magazines [wikipedia.org] and dreaming of what the future would bring. Infectious writing that made you want to tinker with PCs all day, then read science fiction all night.

Re:My CORRECTED link to his 2004 article, post-cof

[Registered Coward v2]

I meet Jerry at a computer show I was covering. I saw him in the press room, introduced myself, said I really like his style and said I copied it for my column. He looked at me and said steal, only amateurs copy, we professionals steal. Had an interesting conversation. Great guy who will be missed.

Re: An American treasure

[Gavino]

He was basically the Elizabeth Holmes tech journalism

They don't make 'em like that any more

[paul_engr]

I miss when tech journalism was more than just parroting corporate press releases and sucking the asshole of broligarchs without any original analysis or commentary

Represented an entire era

[vistic]

My memory is that I had joined Apple the first time right after Jobs stepped down as CEO, when he remained as Chairman... right before he passed away. Then the Steve Jobs interview was released and I saw it at the Aquarius Theater in Stanford and Cringely was there in person at the showing. Stylish as ever.

To me he represented a whole era of computing, when it was exciting me, before I had really started making a living with computers yet. Back when I really did learn a lot by reading physical magazines.

Back in the day, doom scrolling but on paper.

[ip_freely_2000]

It was like opening Harper's magazine and looking at the index first. Just full of quick info and small bites. RIP to him.

Odd choice of pen name

[cascadingstylesheet]

I mean, refreshingly self aware, but ...

How about ...

[kbahey]

How about this for punditry?

Cringley thinks Apple and Intel are merging [slashdot.org].

Also, there has been a recurring [slashdot.org] comment [slashdot.org] here on Slashdot about Robert X Cringley, with all sorts of claims allegedly made by him. However, it is posted anonymously, and does not provide sources..

The "working at Apple as employee #12" part appears on a speaker biography [tasscc.org].

The same bio also says he taught for several years at Stanford.

This Reddit comment [reddit.com] says that he claimed he has a PhD from Stanford when he worked at Infoworld.

This page [yavchn.com] has more of his claims (invented the trash can icon, ...), and details his foray into Kickstarter and Minecraft.

So, lots of questions about him, to say the least ...

Re:

[cascadingstylesheet]

I know I always ... cringed ... when I saw his byline on a Slashdot post's article.

One of the best of the early PC industry

[mabu]

Always been a big fan of the Cringe and met him several times. Always an interesting character. His book, "Accidental Empires" is a must read for anybody wanting to understand how we got to where we are today. He will be missed.

I helped change his column once...

[acroyear]

Some time in the middle of the year in the 90s, I looked back at his January predictions for that year, and tallied up which ones I thought had come to pass by that point (I came up with 6 so far, with 1 a total not happening, and the other 3 still had time). Bob responded privately thinking it was more like 7, but regardless, at the end of the year, he did his first recap of last year's predictions before moving on to the next's.

He made that a column and blog tradition for at least 15 years until his writing output reduced.

I definitely enjoyed some of his 'hot takes'

[zuki]

Always fairly interesting P.O.V., even if I didn't necessarily agree with 100% of it. He was a very unique and colorful figure.

R.I.P.

Bob will be missed

[tjansen]

Ever since I read Accidental Empires as a kid I knew that I wanted to work at a startup (or even found one) and live in Silicon Valley. That didnâ(TM)t really work out, even though I havenâ(TM)t fully given up yet (except the Silicon Valley part). I probably wouldnâ(TM)t be on Slashdot without him. Over the last decades I enjoyed his blogs, looked forward every year to his bold prediction, and was entertained by the crazy (but not successful) startups we he worked on. This year I was thrilled that he started blogging again, only to be shocked that even more terrible things have happened to him (heart attack, stroke and death of this son), and surprised that he was an ex-neighbour of and friends with Avram Miller, who writes an awesome blog I discovered to is year. RIP Bob. You will be missed.

A Dear Friend of The Community - So Talented

[TheWho79]

I met him in circa 2003 when he sent CBS to my office unannounced to interview me about Google Bot (it ended up in The Google Guys special on cbs). I met him again when he keynoted Pubcon Las Vegas. He was extremely kind to me and my family - even took time to go out of his way to meet my mom & dad who just happened to be in the hotel lobby at the same time.

His story about getting fired from Apple is legendary. They would send an email and then delete it - which would still delete it off the end users box. So they'd play a game of "nasty email", and see who had the guts a) to send it to their boss and b) who would let it set there and risk the boss reading it!

He was fearless and self deprecating and...

[mtm_king]

I learned how computers/PCs worked reading InfoWorld and Byte magazine. (I put in 40 years in the biz). Never met him, but I felt like we were friends. Admittedly, some of his predictions missed the bullseye (still waiting for IBM to go bust). But he was fearless and self deprecating. For me his writing style just a pleasure to read. He made a difference in my life. Peace to you Robert X. Cringely.

Real Foresight

[bill_mcgonigle]

I remember reading sometime around '98 his projection that by 2012 it would be less expensive to unicast video than to reach the same person by broadcast.

It seemed fantastical to those of us paying $200/mo for a 128K line and a 320x240 QuickTime was impressive.

A few smart people may have paid attention and skated to where the puck would be

Sure enough Youtube and the like really exploded around that time.

I'm pretty sure in '98 I didn't understand the sheer variety of content that would emerge and thought he meant the big networks might move their shows to the Internet. I remember investigating the mbone around then as unicasting didn't make sense to me. In some ways it still doesn't.

Bob got it, though.

Somewhere I have a Marc Stevens book on atomic energy collecting dust on a book shelf. I should probably see how much he got right in retrospect.

He published my virus idea...

[bscott]

Must've been some time in the 90s, I wrote to him suggesting that computer viruses could easily get a lot worse - what if, instead of merely replicating (this was long before ransomware), they would search the drive for spreadsheet files and change a few numbers at random before moving on.

I did not expect him to publish this, but he did, adding (IIRC) "you'd be one mean-assed virus writer!"

Memories.

[methano]

I looked forward to getting InfoWorld each week to see what was going on in the personal computer world. I always started at the front and read through knowing that a great dessert awaited at the end, the "Robert X. Cringely" column. I'm surprised that so few have commented on Slashdot. Maybe most of the old guys, like Cringely, have passed on the the great Comdex in the sky.