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.
820 points | 177 commentspage 7
jeffhwang 23 hours ago|
Sad news. Reading his columns post dotcom bubble was always interesting even when I disagreed—which was often!
cantrevealname 17 hours ago||
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.
Upvoter33 16 hours ago|||
Is getting rich important?
embedding-shape 17 hours ago||
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.
linguae 1 day ago||
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 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.