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.
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.
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.
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.
+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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 and the culture there was very tech focused. Idealist 80s-90s hacker culture kids mixed with 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 dot-com boom and especially after it that culture got washed away by 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.
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
BTW, there are 2 "Robert X. Cringely", one owned by InfoWorld, one owned by Mark Stephens.
https://www.wired.com/1998/12/cringely/
https://www.cringely.com/bout-bob/
I hope Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson cover his passing, they knew him.
twit dot tv
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.
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 and the culture there was very tech focused. Idealist 80s-90s hacker culture kids mixed with 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 dot-com boom and especially after it that culture got washed away by 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.