For those who enjoyed the recent transcript of the PBS documentary Triumph
of the Nerds, distributed here recently, and the book "Accidental
Empires," available from Recording for the Blind, here is a brief
biography of robert Cringely.

kelly 

from the December 1998 issue of Wired
   
   The Double Life of Robert X. Cringely 
   
   Revelations of a Silicon Valley confidence man. 
   
   By Liesl Schillinger 
   
   On page 24 of Accidental Empires, his best-selling 1992 book about the
   birth of the PC business, Robert X. Cringely published the personal
   phone number of a renowned computer industry insider: himself. Between
   1987 and 1995, Cringely wrote the "Notes from the Field" column for
   InfoWorld magazine, reporting on Silicon Valley's brave new world and
   the billionaire nerds who ran it. In so doing, he became the preferred
   confidant of the players that everyone in the industry wanted to know
   about. He was no Matt Drudge, he was a Boswell, judiciously praising
   and blaming the great men of the cyber age with one eye on history,
   one on human nature. He demystified the transistor, he opined on
   graphical user interfaces, he analyzed operating systems, he dished on
   undishy men like Paul Allen, Steve Wozniak, and Jim Warren.
   
   He has also called Bill Gates a megalomaniac and Steve Jobs a
   sociopath, comparing them - vis-à-vis each other's managerial auras -
   to Stalin versus Hitler.
   
   In 1996, PBS aired a documentary of Accidental Empires called Triumph
   of the Nerds, and on camera, the players who had previously whispered
   their secrets to Cringely began to shout them. An IBM lifer, Sam
   Albert, sang a hearty IBM company fight song in duet with Cringely -
   and, famously, Steve Jobs bluntly declared that he thought Microsoft
   made mediocre products, a salvo that caused a rift between Jobs and
   Gates. By last year, the two men had mended fence. Gates gave Apple
   $150 million, and Apple and Microsoft shook on a joint licensing
   agreement.
   
   Yet in Cringely's new PBS documentary, Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of
   the Internet, which premieres November 25, Jobs again spoils for
   trouble, saying the Web is "exciting" chiefly because "Microsoft
   doesn't own it, so there's an incredible amount of innovation going
   on."
   
   Why do they all open up to a man who concedes that he is "just a
   little bit dangerous"? Cringely knows why. "I've been on the periphery
   of the room in every room they've ever been in, and I've been asking
   questions for 20 years," he says. Besides, he explains, "Bill likes
   our interviews because I don't bore him, and that probably is true for
   Steve as well."
   
   This is not to say that Cringely doesn't sometimes get on people's
   nerves. He has been flamed by WebTV grannies who resent his dismissal
   of their high tech toy, and by "very, very fervent" Macintosh users
   who resent any criticism at all. Cringely was thrilled when Gates
   tried to disprove an anecdote from Accidental Empires. In the book,
   Gates goes to a convenience store in 1990 (net worth at the time: $3
   billion) to get a tub of butter pecan ice cream. At the checkout
   counter, he can't find a 50-cents-off coupon he had brought, and as he
   searches and searches, a frustrated customer farther back in line
   finally tosses him two quarters, which Gates takes. The customer calls
   out, "Pay me back when you earn your first million." Gates told
   Cringely the story couldn't be true because coupons come in the daily
   newspaper, and he doesn't get a daily newspaper. "He wanted me to buy
   it!" Cringely marvels. "Why? Who am I to him?"
   
   As it happens, Bob Cringely is not really Robert X. Cringely - or
   rather, he is not the only Robert X. Cringely. He was born Mark
   Stephens, and grew up in Apple Creek, Ohio. His mother was a
   librarian, his father was a labor union organizer, and he has an older
   brother and a younger sister, who both work in the computer industry
   today. Cringely built two small planes with his father before he was
   14, and as a teenager, he decided he wanted to study in England, and
   found himself a scholarship to a tony old boarding school near
   Liverpool called the Merchant Taylors' School. He got his pilot's
   license there as part of the school's compulsory military training.
   "British tax dollars paid to teach me to fly," he gloats.
   
   Mark Stephens went to the College of Wooster, in Ohio, where he
   majored in physics, bowled, sang tenor in the choir, and chased girls.
   After graduating, he raced off to Northern Ireland and Beirut to cover
   foreign wars as a newspaper stringer, but by 1977, he had returned to
   America, married, and moved to California. He worked with Steve Jobs
   in the early days of Apple, and when Jobs offered him shares in the
   company as payment, Cringely held out for payment at $6 an hour.
   "Let's not think about that," he says. He went to Stanford and got a
   master's degree in communication research, but he tired of school, and
   in the late '80s, he joined InfoWorld.
   
   His first marriage ended along the way, and so did a second, and now
   he lives with his girlfriend, a former InfoWorld employee named Katy
   Gurley, in an idyllic tudor stucco house on a leafy street in
   Burlingame. He works in an office in San Mateo, 10 minutes away by car
   - by his 11-year-old Honda Civic, that is.
   
   Cringely is 45, with brown wire-rimmed Armani glasses, shaggy dark
   brown hair, and the loping gait and rumpled wardrobe of an aging
   college student - pale beige cotton trousers and a purple tennis
   shirt. His office is one in a row of low, cookie-cutter buildings on a
   drab commercial strip, and it is attached to a long, high-ceilinged
   garage, where Oregon Public Broadcasting has filmed hours and hours of
   footage for PBS of Cringely gabbing and tinkering with his computers
   and his single-engine home-built planes. It is here that he runs his
   Internet start-up, Pronto, which does something so confusing and
   specific to streamline inter-computer communication that Cringely
   despairs of explaining it. It is also here that he writes his weekly
   PBS Web column "I, Cringely" (www.pbs.org/cringely/), works on his
   next book, which he has only recently gotten a bead on and would
   rather not talk about, and juggles calls from his editors, his
   publicist, his book agent, his speaking agent, and all the other
   people who think they need Robert X. Cringely's ear.
   
   Some of those callers, even now, six years after Accidental Empires
   first came out, are new groupies who pick up his book, find his phone
   number, and dial it to see if it works. Cringely loves it when they
   do. "The most calls I've ever gotten was 13 in one day," he says.
   "It's flattering. If I'm here, I talk to them."
   
     The method to his meekness? "It takes a failure to gain access to
     an ego-driven industry." 
     
   It is this ability to be, or rather to seem, an ordinary guy that is
   the source of Cringely's extraordinary success.
   
   On a sunny Saturday afternoon this fall, Cringely had just returned
   from the East Coast, where he had been shooting a PBS special called
   Digital TV: A Cringely Crash Course, which would air November 9. He
   had interviewed Mister Rogers (they sang the song "Look and Listen"
   together), and made a salad with Julia Child in her Somerville,
   Massachusetts, kitchen. "A salade digitale," he specified. He had just
   wrapped a pilot Cringely show, which premiered in October on Britain's
   Channel 4. "I have a lousy life," he kvetched as we roamed his office,
   which is covered in demure powder-blue wallpaper. "I don't get enough
   exercise. I enjoy the airplane stuff but I don't fly enough." We sat
   down on two big padded sofas, amid a metal and paper furze of Diet
   Coke cans, magazines left by British film crews, and copies of his
   book in Japanese, French, German, and Dutch. From the jumble, he
   singled out one item for admiration: a yellow and aqua plastic clicky
   pen that read, "Kitty's Cathouse: Red Light District, Carson City,
   Nevada. Hot Wild Kinky Sex." "It was a gift," he crowed, wanting to be
   doubted.
   
   "Over the last 10 years, as nerd has taken on the connotation of
   successful businessperson, it has lost its sting," he went on, taking
   a sip of Slurpee. "In the last two years, geek has even lost its
   sting."
   
   Not that this has brought Cringely any closer to success. He still has
   no money, he likes to point out; he rents his house, he doesn't own a
   Lexus. Whatever you do, don't envy Cringely - his livelihood depends
   on it. As he wrote in his book, "It takes a failure - someone who is
   not quite clever enough to succeed or to be considered a threat - to
   gain access to the heart of any competitive, ego-driven industry." But
   there is method in his meekness, and he is luckier than he lets on. It
   is lucky, for example, that Mark Stephens is allowed to call himself
   Cringely, and to publish books, and narrate TV shows, under that name.
   
   A million years ago, before there was a Robert X. Cringely,
   InfoWorld's industry column was written by a man named John Dvorak.
   When Dvorak departed, his byline left with him, and the editors
   panicked. As it happened, InfoWorld already had a fictional employee
   on the masthead, one Robert X. Cringely, who took the blame when
   things went wrong. Aha! The editors would turn their imaginary
   whipping boy into a permanent columnist; his name would live forever,
   no matter how many writers came and went. Most of the Cringelys who
   followed Dvorak served their term for only a short time. Stephens, who
   was the third Robert X. Cringely, was the exception; he stayed eight
   years - so long that Mark Stephens, who had worked as a foreign
   correspondent, earned a PhD, and even written a book on the Three Mile
   Island accident, fell by the wayside. When I tentatively called him
   "Mark," he laughed impishly. He will answer to either name, but
   professionally, he sees himself only as Cringely. "With my clothes on,
   I'm Bob," he said.
   
   Unfortunately, in 1995, as PBS was editing Triumph of the Nerds,
   InfoWorld fired Stephens - which was sort of like firing Mary Ann
   Evans from being George Eliot. InfoWorld thought that it ought to have
   exclusive dibs on the Cringely name. (In a spooky twist, if anyone
   really owns the rights to the Cringely name, it is probably Cringely's
   girlfriend's father, who put an imaginary "Al Cringely" scapegoat on
   his PR firm's masthead decades ago. The surname was eventually
   imported by InfoWorld.) Cringely still feels the betrayal deeply -
   first because, as he sees it, InfoWorld dismissed him without warning,
   and second, because they accused him of trademark infringement for
   continuing to use the name that he had done so much to build.
   "InfoWorld sued me," he says, still sounding incredulous. The case was
   settled out of court; InfoWorld kept the trademark, and today, another
   scribe's Cringely column appears in its pages every week. But the
   company was ordered to pay Cringely's court costs, and he was given
   license to use the coveted name professionally - "As long as he
   doesn't use it in computer publications," InfoWorld's editor, Sandy
   Reed, who fired him, clarifies. "PBS we don't compete with."The lowly
   Cringely, as ever, somehow came out on top.
   
   Cringely subtitled Accidental Empires "How the Boys of Silicon Valley
   Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a
   Date," so it is tempting to think that Cringely himself must be a
   socially inept computer geek. This is the peer group he has chosen to
   glorify, but anyone who watches his quirky PBS documentaries can see
   that Cringely, coasting down Highway 101 in a red convertible T-bird
   belting "Scarborough Fair," soaking in hot tubs with computer gurus,
   invading the castles of software millionaires, flying a lemon yellow
   plane, is no shambling, inhibited dweeb.
   
   He has never been more user-friendly than he is in Nerds 2.0.1. He
   sings the national anthem in a booming voice at a 3Com Park ballgame,
   interviews a cyber sex vixen, rides in grocery carts with webheads,
   and plays ultimate frisbee with Internet venture capitalists who shout
   at him in unison, "Sorry Bob, your idea sucks, we're not funding it!"
   
   But during all the commotion, again and again, he also takes time to
   visit a young, blond bespectacled dweeb named Graham Spencer, the
   brains behind Excite. Cringely drops in on Spencer and his partners in
   1994 in their junky garage "Architext" start-up, revisits in 1997, as
   they've become millionaires, and again in 1998, as they are moving
   into a corporate Magic Kingdom office complex. He visits them just to
   pay tribute.
   
   What of his own start-up? Cringely humbly concedes he's probably going
   to have to relinquish control, "not just for financial reasons, but
   because I'm not qualified to run it." Poor Bob. Condemned to make his
   livelihood by chronicling the fabulous successes of others - and too
   harried to notice that they're giving him the time of his life.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
   Liesl Schillinger ([log in to unmask]) is a freelance
   writer based in New York. 


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