Thank You Mark Stephens, aka Robert X. Cringely
News of the death of Mark Stephens has been making the rounds on social media this week. You're probably not familiar with that name. You might be familiar with the name "Robert X. Cringely," the brand under which he wrote nearly a decade's worth of columns for InfoWorld in the 1980s and 1990s.
His death is unconfirmed (there isn't a peep of it on his website, where he recently resumed blogging).
Over on Threads, Harry McCracken has provided a good rundown of his public life and career. I had known that "Cringely" was a pseudonym. I didn't know that he wasn't InfoWorld's first Cringely, nor was he its last. He left the magazine and decided to just keep right on using the name that made him famous, even after the name got him sued by his former publishers. Read Harry's posts for details.
Stephens left the world of tech magazine columnistry/punditry just as I was entering it, and I didn't qualify for an InfoWorld subscription despite being an adept and shameless tech grifter in my student days. Consequently, I first became familiar with him via Accidental Empires, his popular book about the rise of Apple and Microsoft and other second (third)-stage Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. It was so timely and fun that it became a series on PBS.
I really really came to know his work through a less-well-known documentary series he made for PBS: Plane Crazy. It documents his adventures in building an airplane all by himself, in one month. If that weren't inadvisable enough, he raised the stakes by devising and incorporating a hitherto-untested structural design. He decided to build a craft that relies on carbon fiber in a safety-critical structural component, over a quarter century before OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush took the same idea and really ran with it.
How did it work out? Better than it did on the Titan, definitely. But only in the sense that nobody got hurt. He invites an aerospace design expert to the shop to show off his progress. During the guy's car ride back to the train station or whatever – without Stephens present – he tells the documentarians that he not only has no intention to take Stephens up on his invitation to ride along in the craft's first flight, he also doesn't want to be anywhere near the entire airfield when it happens.
The documentary further endeared me by the scene where he's so beaten down by failures, deadlines, and his commitment to complete this aircraft for the documentary that he grumpily orders the crew out of the workshop. And underscores the gravity of this command by waving a two-by-four at them.
(For you kids out there who were raised on reality TV and are quite wisely dismissing this flashy outburst as something they staged for the camera: you could be right, but this was 1997, when reality TV was barely a snot-rocket in Puck's (of The Real World: San Francisco) nose. It was still being made by seasoned, but slumming, documentary filmmakers. Also, this was PBS.)
Like I said, Stephens was a popular columnist long before it was possible to read everything published everywhere, so I don't think his columns ever floated into my line of sight. It would have been different if he wrote about Apple or Lucasfilm. But after reading Harry's tribute, I'm aware that I owe this guy.
When I was first hired on as a tech magazine columnist, I wasn't aping anybody's style. The writers who'd (for better of worse) influenced me had nothing do with tech writing, even. In retrospect, however, it's clear that by the time I came along with my little manila folder of writing samples, Robert X. Cringely (as well as John Dvorak, another InfoWorld alum who passed away this year) had already proven to editors and publishers that there was an audience out there for tech columnists who made no attempts whatsoever to hide their personalities and their points of view.
Without those precedents, I might not have been hired and I sure wouldn't have gotten away with as much as I did. I've had loads and loads of fun in this dodge ever since…certainly way too much fun to pivot away to startups, as Stephens did. For that, I'm genuinely grateful.