Tell HN: Bob Cringely has died | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Bob Cringely has died

577 pointspaveworld113 comments

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.

View on HN

Damn. I've loved Bob and his writings ever since I read Accidental Empires as a kid. He went through some crazy shit over the last few years (lost his house, almost blind). And when he started blogging again this year (https://www.cringely.com/2026/05/27/where-the-heck-have-i-be...), the stories got even worse (lost his son, heart attack, stroke). RIP.

Jesus. That is gut wrenching.

I hope they're both sitting and reading and learning together now, wherever they may be. I never caught this update but remember thinking about what he was up to some year ago, really sad all around. Rest in peace and I hope they're both remembered for a long time, I sure will.

Reminded me of John C Dvorak, same generation, had a heart attack in April then died in July...

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

thanks for posting <3 this is great

Yup, saw this vid decades ago. It still seems like yesterday.

"Watching him try (and fail) to build a composite airplane "

But the plane did fly.

> 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.

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.

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

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?

De mortuis and all that, but someone has pointed out the poor track record of his later initiatives and I think the reasons for those failures are an important part of the picture. Look at his last few blog posts, outlining a radical alternative to LLMs. Read closely, and at the heart of that idea we find "assume enterprise search". But the willingness to consider radical alternatives is part of the right way to think.

>But the willingness to consider radical alternatives is part of the right way to think.

That sounds liked LinkedIn speak.

That's true, but also a stopped clock is right twice a day. Something can simultaneously sound like LinkedIn speak and be true.

I was a big fan of this guy's work. Great documentaries. Triumph of the Nerds was a great watch — I gifted this to several people. I also watch the lost Steve Jobs documentary every few years for inspiration. Accidental Empires was a great read — I always think of Larry Ellison doing the NYT Crossword puzzle when I read about all the Paramount drama. He'll be missed.

He was a very entertaining blogger! RIP.

However, he was also ripping people off and making up stuff: https://www.jeremyreimer.com/rockets-item.lsp?f=true&p=272

Rest in peace Robert X. Cringely. For those interested, the documentary "Triumph of the Nerds" is available on the Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/triumph_of_the_nerds

Not to be confused as the other Triumph of the Attack of the Clones and Nerd of the Rings:

https://youtu.be/YKT7bx-fmtk?t=77

I first learned of the concept of “buffer bloat” from him, and how artificially limiting your upload bandwidth a bit can avoid huge lag spikes https://www.cringely.com/2011/01/04/2011-predictions-one-wor...

I loved this documentary. It really captured what I loved about this job.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmbrFFP7bXU

Here's a fun clip. I think this company is the one which eventually became the one behind the excite search engine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf4SKkTEkfU

I think this is also a clip from the same documentary. We had to watch this as part of IT class in high school, everyone laughed pretty hard

Incredibly sad news. I first learned of him and watched his documentaries just a few years ago. It’s difficult to understate, if you happen to be a tech nerd, how much fun “Triumph of the Nerds” and “Nerds 2.0.1” are to watch, even nowadays.

"overstate"

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).

Cool story but after doing some digging it’s likely not true.

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

Unfortunate, but an excellent moral story about how lies can snowball quickly.

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.

The Jason Arday of technology columnists.

Makes me wonder if he's actually dead...

So 12 hours later (or so), there's still no confirmation that he actually died.

And previously this: https://www.cringely.com/2013/04/07/cringely-comes-back-from...

Sad to hear that, apart things already mention I'd like to point out his NerdTV interviews - especially Dan Drake one (Autodesk co-founder). I always suspected, but that interview kind of validated how Autodesk went after competition as a strategy (to buy them outright). You can watch them all here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NerdTV

Interesting! I actually work at Autodesk and my job is mainly to help users of acquired product A move over to (also) acquired product B (product B was previously a competitor of product A). I guess this acquisition culture must’ve been around long before me!

What’s that job role titled? I’m looking for work and that seems like something I could be okay at, and likely in demand enough to offer realistic prospects. Thanks in advance.

Are you the one who cleverly arranged for a ceiling tile to fall on Ton Roosendaal when he was talking about supporting Autodesk, getting brought to court and most certainly losing, and the Blender Foundation owning the Blender code? ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJwG-qt-sgk

Rest in peace Bob. One of the great early tech writers. The feeling of his writing -- the blend of fact and opinion and sense of humor, and more than anything the sense the really cared -- always felt to me like one of the seeds that developed into the blogosphere.

I loved the book Accidental Empires, and it inspired me to become a programmer. RIP Bob. You were the best.

+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.

For historical technology, one of the must reads along with Soul of a New Machine and Hackers

This is a famous documentary from him: https://youtu.be/toSRmKKiosQ?is=kj1fkHSfpGsLoBVf

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

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

All of the early 90s were colored with his take on things.

RIP. Damn and Dvorak died earlier this year? What a sad year for legendary computer columnists.

Om too. Bad year.

Was going to say exactly this. They were the most independent of thinkers in the industry

It's a pity that new media has never really thrown up a replacement for those sort of columnists, isn't it? Negroponte in Wired, Douglas Adams in MacUser, and (slightly more obscure!) Dave Langford's work in various Amstrad PCW magazines in the UK.

Slashdot did experiment a little with Jon Katz, most notably his 'Voices from the Hellmouth' series, but he was never really aiming to sound the same note of wry detachment as those magazine greats.

It's a pity - I'd rather read a monthly column of that sort than any amount of pointless bickering on Twitter.

To quote Fran Lebowtiz "A great audience is more important for the creation of great art than great artists are"... We've lost a great, ironic, self aware informed commentariat because a literate, emotionally stable audience for long form content has shrunk. Which means the work isn't there (or at least isn't distributed beyond a few substacks), to perpetuate and expand that audience.

I see the same effect all the time in fiction. Innovative challenging books don't get published (or even picked up by agents), because the publishing industry is run by the kind of people who are frightened and offended by such books. Which means the audience for those books become only those lucky enough to be exposed to older, denser, more innovative fiction - which invariably shrinks.

You've had this fragmentation of attention. Many of the main computer magazines had essentially destination columnists whether writing under their own name or a pseudonym--which periodically passed to a new writer (which in Cringely's case was a matter of some controversy at one point). The latter were often written in a sort of gossipy style intended to make the reader feel that they had an inside view of a company or an area of technology.

It was a different time.

Just to confirm ... this Bob Cringely?

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

Yes. RIP.

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...

Previously: https://www.cringely.com/2013/04/07/cringely-comes-back-from...

I never read this dude’s stuff but by golly is it just stuffed with humanity. I feel like I’m talking with the man reading these.

I remember watching him on PBS. There was something great about turning on the TV and finding someone who thought computers, and the people behind them, were interesting enough to spend a whole evening on. Sorta rare at that time.

His “Lost Interview” with Steve is incredible.

Listening to Steve talk about the benefits of object oriented programming is something else

Reading accidental empires is how i learned that the tech industry even existed

Same, that was my introduction to ‘tech culture’.

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.

Huge influence on my youth. He seemed like the inconvenient insider of 90s Silicon Valley. Like a PBS-trained version of pud.

Ah man there is a blast from the past. Fucked Company was so interesting and entertaining at the time.

RIP

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

His death was far too early. It's hard to explain how much influence Cringely had over the years, how many minds were influenced by him - and how much his humor has been assimilated into the tech industry. He 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.

Damn. I've been re-watching his documentaries recently. He was one of the greats.

Future generations will have a better understanding of the personalities and history of the personal computer industry because of his work.

Loved his book, and documentary.

BTW, there are 2 "Robert X. Cringely", one owned by InfoWorld, one owned by Mark Stephens.

https://www.wired.com/1998/12/cringely/

Ah man...

Hadn't heard from him in years. Then he posted that he was going to start writing again and I was so very glad to hear it... And now...

The dude was to me what tech journalism was. Between Cringely and Dvorak leaving us, we're losing the old guard. I'm bummed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48236501

Had to login to pay my respects. His blog "this rag" as he used to call it was foundational in my professional life. And I still typed cringley.com by hand to read his posts. He had a several tragedies in his life... But now his soul can be with his children.

RIP hacker from a bygone era..

Oh man...this one hit me tonight! I remember watching Triumph of the Nerds in high school and loving every second of it! I read his column on PBS for years and followed him to his blog later...and kinda fell off as I fell off of so many things. Bob was influential in turning my childhood passion for computers into my career.

It's especially tragic for his family as Bob had announced that his son Cole, aged 21, had passed away back in April. Condolences to all those who knew Mark, Cole, and their loved ones. RIP.

Triumph of the Nerds and Pirates of Silicon Valley is what convinced me to actually pursue software as a career. It was so hugely influential.

Just read that here. So sad, tragic.

https://www.cringely.com/2026/05/27/where-the-heck-have-i-be...

I've got fond memories of reading "The Little Engine That Could", his article on the wonders of mesh networking, potentially cheaply by flashing Linksys WRT54G with OpenWRT

>...the WRT54G with Sveasoft firmware is all you need to become your cul de sac's wireless ISP. Going further, if a bunch of your friends in town had similarly configured WRT54Gs, they could seamlessly work together and put out of business your local telephone company.

https://web.archive.org/web/20040608142623/http://www.pbs.or...

First time i’ve heard of bob (born late 90s I guess). Had a great afternoon watching his videos. Thanks for the fun, best wishes to the family.

Very sad news. My VHS box set of "Triumph of the Nerds" resides proudly on my bookshelf.

I remember my mother buying me "Accidental Empires" from a bargain bin at the local bookstore as a tween. I must have read it multiple times. Dot product that with "The Cuckoo's Egg" and any technical books and magazines I could get hold of, and you have the formative reading of my career.

Dang - black ribbon please

Dvorak, Om and Robert. Damn. Their takes on tech taught me a lot and shaped how I think about this industry. RIP.

Sad news. I’ve read his blog for forever, Bob was a total industry legend. Best wishes to his family

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.

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.

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.

Is getting rich important?

What a great storyteller. Im surprised Triumph is mostly forgotten today. I remember being disturbed by his accounting of how Microsoft gave birth to DOS.

I greatly enjoyed his book Accidental Empires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_Empires

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.

I honestly hadn't heard of him before, and it's sad to be learning about him this way. I'll be watching Triumph of the Nerds tonight. RIP.

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.

His takes on IBM were always interesting, especially during that turbulent time with Ginny. He is missed.

Sad news. Reading his columns post dotcom bubble was always interesting even when I disagreed—which was often!

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.

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.

I loved "I, Cringely"

RIP. I loved Triumph of the Nerds as a teenager.

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.

Well said

> 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 (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.

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.

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.

> even as it was dying

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.

RIP

Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_X._Cringely

  Born Mark Stephens 
    January 28, 1953 (age 73)
    Apple Creek, Ohio, U.S.

JUST updated. I had 8 minutes left to edit this.

Died October 3, 2026 (aged 73)

...and the edit wars begin.

Oh no. RIP!!

What?

He was only in his early 70’s.

This hits hard. Bob meant a lot to me I exchanged emails with him back in the 1990s and he gave me advice on a software project.

RIP…

Yeah, "Triumph of the Nerds" was a wonderful adventure. Now, "Triumph of the Lamers" is taking over.

RIP

It is not a good time to be a nerd.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com