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.
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?
But the plane did fly.
The top comment lays it out as it is, lmao. And it was far more than 30 days as well.
Unfortunately, the site became more difficult to read in later years when it turned out that a lot of what he was saying was evidently false. Even more so when he switched over to AI-generated content.
Still, Triumph is an amazing documentary that I’ve watched many, many times.
However, he was also ripping people off and making up stuff: https://www.jeremyreimer.com/rockets-item.lsp?f=true&p=272
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
PBS website: He wrote a column that their site no longer hosts, but the Wayback Machine has it snapshotted frequently, including just after his final submission for the outlet in 2008: https://web.archive.org/web/20081223220604/http://www.pbs.or...
NerdTV: In an era of nascent web video, he produced long-form video interviews with tech types, and clipped what might now be called "Shorts/Tiktoks" from the conversations, pulling out the of "the juicy bit" and "the nerdy bit". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NerdTV (h/t to u/Keyframe)
And obliquely, Cringely's columns or videos were the first place I recall hearing about foveated approaches to video compression for streaming. I thought it sounded like a terrible idea, but I guess Valve delivered, 20 years on, using the technique to good effect with the Steam Frame. Chalk one up for Cringely; RIP.
Early employee at Apple who was offered to be paid in stock. He “held out for the cash”.
I really like the triumph of the nerds series. Getting bill Gates, Balmer, Jobs and those IBMers to explain how it all came together and how MS who didn’t have an OS ended up getting one to sell to IBM.
The transcripts are a good
But yeah..
“well for a short time I was an employee of Apple Computer, employee number 12 and one day I helped move materials out of this garage. At the time Steve Jobs said that the company was short of loot so he offered to pay me in company shares, but I held out for the money - my mother still reminds me of that incident.”
Mark Stephens does not appear anywhere in this list, nor have any other early employees confirmed that he worked there.
Yes, this might have just been a small slip-up on Cringely's part, but the trouble is that he continued to make claims about being employed by Apple that were clearly fabricated. For example, Cringely claimed to have invented the Lisa's trash can icon in this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06M64l7pPIk&t=373s but if you read about the same story from other Apple employees, they don't mention him at all: https://folklore.org/Rosings_Rascals.html
These "tall tales" start to add up, and it becomes very hard to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Cringely was a great writer, a great documentarian, and really wonderful at finding the human stories behind the giants of the personal computer industry. Unfortunately, he also often made up stories about himself that were later found to be untrue. He didn't need to do this, because his work stood on its own. It was just a flaw in his personality.
In any case, this is sad news. Rest in peace, Mark Stephens.
https://web.archive.org/web/20001015151303/http://www.pbs.or...
You can ask you favorite LLM to compare the parallels; I did and it was enlightening.
(Just realized I've never read the 1996 update/revision. Adding it to the top of my list.)
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
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. You would see this pattern in almost everything he did, unless he was lucky enough to get it right on the first try.
1) he would make a lot of promises based on a dream of accomplishing something that no one had ever done before,
2) experts he would consult would tell him that they didn't think it was 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?
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.
He appears to be fine, and just published Ansible® 471: https://news.ansible.uk/a471.html
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.
It was a different time.
I hope Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson cover his passing, they knew him.
twit dot tv
Listening to Steve talk about the benefits of object oriented programming is something else
https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-to...
A great a free thinker.
On How You Can Reach Him to Tell Him He’s a Dipstick
Robert X. Cringely
(707) 525-9519
(707) 525-9517 (fax)
bob@cringely.com
Bob, bob, bob...you freeeeking dipstick.
You're not supposed to die that young. That wasn't part of the deal.BTW, there are 2 "Robert X. Cringely", one owned by InfoWorld, one owned by Mark Stephens.
> 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".
I found the patent for his company's technology (https://patents.google.com/patent/US20250259069A1). I always have trouble reading patents, but as far as I can tell it's basically a wrapper around commodity LLMs. The reliability improvements come from prompting the LLM to only source its data from an external database that you provide rather than from whatever it was trained on, and from prompting multiple LLMs simultaneously then doing semantic analysis on the responses to make sure they all agree. I imagine that doing this would probably reduce hallucinations, but there's no hard constraint to prevent them entirely and I'm not sure what the moat is.
That sounds liked LinkedIn speak.
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.
RIP hacker from a bygone era..
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.
https://www.cringely.com/2026/05/27/where-the-heck-have-i-be...
I have rewatched this movie so many times and it was definitely one of the most formative movies for me as well.
(basically because every afternoon or most afternoon if there was no satellite connection I think, I would watch the movie and this was one of the only movies within the pen drives that I had I think.)
When I was in 5-6th grade, I even gave a speech in class about Steve jobs to one of the subjects which was more about personal development/personal trainer. The sir actually used to call me steve jobs afterwards for sometime whenever I used to meet him.
Man do I love pirates of the silicon valley, I really like this song[0]
and random trivia about this song, and that the director of the movie even commented on this song/youtube video (as the video is actually named: "What is the name of this music?") and it turns out that this is an unnamed song.
> As well as using a lot of 70's & 80's classic rock and roll classics appropriate to the era when Jobs and Woz were starting Apple, we also went for "sound-alikes" (for the Ella Fitzgerald number) and created some of our own music. This piece is one of those creations. There is no name for it that I'm aware of.
> Martyn Burke
> Director-Pirates of Silicon Valley
>...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...
John Dvorak passed July 20, 2026 Mark Stephens/Robert X. Cringely October 3, 2026
Robert X Bishop
Did an amazing job documenting the computer revolution and the internet revolution.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.jeremyreimer.com/rockets-item.lsp?f=true&p=272 makes it sound like the "crazy shit over the last few years" wasn't rue.
The post makes a strong case that the cataracts story and the losing his house story were false, among others.
If you're wondering why someone would make things like this up, it appears that they were cover stories for his Mineserver Kickstarter never shipping despite him saying "[i]n terms of development, this project was almost finished before the Kickstarter campaign began", "[a]ll these Mineservers will ship this week. Software is complete and SD cards are being duplicated. T-shirts are being printed every night", etc.
If it sounds unbelievable that someone would make these things up to have something to blame for a failed kickstarter, I recommend reading the post. The evidence against the house burning down is hard to argue with (later Google Maps/Street View imaging shows no apparent damage, in a later post he accidentally revealed that he used the exact laptop that he said he replaced because it was lost in the fire) and there's even stronger evidence that a number of his other claims are fabricated.
I used to read his articles back a decade ago. I really enjoyed them. This quote from the article resonated with me. It’s a sobering feeling having dedicated a career to the field to struggle keeping up.
RIP. He seemed to face a lot of struggles both physically and emotionally towards the end of his life.
https://ai.stanford.edu/