Posted by paveworld 1 day ago
Tell HN: Bob Cringely has died
RIP
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 (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.
Damn those were good days.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_X._Cringely
Born Mark Stephens
January 28, 1953 (age 73)
Apple Creek, Ohio, U.S.
Died October 3, 2026 (aged 73)
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.