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Bob Cringely Has Died

2 points by paveworld ↗ HN
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.

226 comments

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jleyank
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.
TuckerBMorgan
Reading accidental empires is how i learned that the tech industry even existed
jimbokun
Future generations will have a better understanding of the personalities and history of the personal computer industry because of his work.
havaloc
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).
derekdahmer
Cool story but after doing some digging it’s likely not true.

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

GaryBluto
Unfortunate, but an excellent moral story about how lies can snowball quickly.
PlunderBunny
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.
stevenwoo
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.
chillup
The Jason Arday of technology columnists.
wyclif
So 12 hours later (or so), there's still no confirmation that he actually died.
stonedivot
This absolutely needs to be read by anyone here speaking of this man like some kind of tech god
specialist
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

pessimizer
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:

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

2) experts he consults tell him that they don't think it's 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?

jacquesm
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.

jdswain
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.
avadiax
Just to confirm ... this Bob Cringely?

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

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dewarrn1
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...
WheelsAtLarge
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.
JMiao
Huge influence on my youth. He seemed like the inconvenient insider of 90s Silicon Valley. Like a PBS-trained version of pud.
dramm
Ah man there is a blast from the past. Fucked Company was so interesting and entertaining at the time.
The_Blade
RIP

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

api
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 done 10 years ago." (This was around 2015.)
georgemcbay
> 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 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.

jakzurr
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.

glokta
I loved the book Accidental Empires, and it inspired me to become a programmer. RIP Bob. You were the best.
kristopolous
For historical technology, one of the must reads along with Soul of a New Machine and Hackers
JKCalhoun
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

thx
thanks for posting <3 this is great
lukan
"Watching him try (and fail) to build a composite airplane "

But the plane did fly.

moffkalast
> 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.

LarsDu88
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.
sho_hn
> Shocked I would ever see this again on HN of all places

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

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

MobiusHorizons
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.
phkahler
>> 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/

ndiddy
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

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

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

syncsynchalt
Just realized we're talking about Robert X. Cringely. I always knew him as that, rather than Bob.

I was an avid listener of TWiT for years.

xbar
All of the early 90s were colored with his take on things.
linguae
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.
jeffhwang
Sad news. Reading his columns post dotcom bubble was always interesting even when I disagreed—which was often!
zyk_computer
I actually don't know who Bob Cringely is, and it is unfortunate to have learned about him in this way.
DoesntMatter22
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.

mrcwinn
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.
ChrisMarshallNY
> even as it was dying

There was a lot of that, last century. Made being an Apple developer difficult. We would suffer a constant barrage 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.

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

m000
Ragebaiting people online before it was cool?
KyleSanderson
His takes on IBM were always interesting, especially during that turbulent time with Ginny. He is missed.
ghaff
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.
driverdan
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.