Robert X. Cringely

Mark Stephens was born on January 28, 1953, in Ohio (his family obituary says Cleveland; Wikipedia and IMDb list Apple Creek). He grew up in Apple Creek, the son of Ray and Lois Stephens, with an older brother and a younger sister. His mother was a librarian and his father a labor union organizer. Before he was 14 he built two small airplanes with his father, the start of a lifelong love of flying. As a teenager he won a scholarship to the Merchant Taylors' School near Liverpool, England, where he learned to fly through the school's compulsory military training. "British tax dollars paid to teach me to fly," he later joked.

Stephens studied physics at the College of Wooster in Ohio, where he also bowled and sang tenor in the choir, and graduated with a BA in 1975. After a spell as a newspaper stringer covering conflict in Northern Ireland and Beirut, he moved to California and earned a master's degree in communication from Stanford University in 1979, staying on to pursue doctoral work. He later wrote that he started at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1978, and said he left Stanford in 1983.

Arriving in Silicon Valley in 1977, Stephens worked with Steve Jobs in the early days of Apple, famously choosing $6 an hour over company stock. In 1979 he served on the Public's Right to Information Task Force of the President's Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, and in 1980 Random House published his book Three Mile Island.

From 1987 to 1995 he wrote InfoWorld's "Notes from the Field" column as Robert X. Cringely, the third writer to use the house pseudonym and by far the longest serving. His 1992 bestseller Accidental Empires became the basis of the 1996 PBS documentary Triumph of the Nerds, which he hosted. After InfoWorld fired him in 1995 and IDG sued over the name, a settlement let him keep using Cringely outside rival computer magazines.

He went on to host Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet (1998), Digital TV: A Cringely Crash Course (1998) and the PBS series Plane Crazy, wrote the weekly I, Cringely column for PBS until December 2008, and produced the interview series NerdTV in 2005 and 2006. His articles also appeared in Forbes, Newsweek, The New York Times, Success, Upside and Worth. From 2009 he published at cringely.com, self-published The Decline and Fall of IBM: End of an American Icon? in 2014, and worked on startups including Mineserver, the satellite launch company Eldorado Space and, in his final years, an AI legal writing tool.

Stephens married more than once. IMDb records a 1976 marriage to Leslie Patricia Elliott that ended in divorce. He later married Mary Alyce (née Neader), with whom he had sons. Two sons died before him: Chase, and Cole, who died in his sleep on April 14, 2026, aged 21, after taking over as chief architect of his father's AI startup while Stephens recovered from a heart attack and stroke. He was survived by Mary Alyce, sons Channing and Fallon, his brother Paul Stephens and his sister Ann Stephens. In 2020 he wrote that he had gone blind and lost his home and business in a fire. He lived for many years in California and spent his final years in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Cringely was openly opinionated and proud of it. He argued that outsiders often see an industry most clearly, writing that "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." He was sharply critical of corporate short-termism, most fully in his IBM reporting, and was famous for blunt verdicts on figures such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

Triumph of the Nerds and Nerds 2.0.1 captured the founders of the PC and internet eras on camera while most were still young, and they remain widely watched on YouTube decades later. Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview, drawn from his 1995 footage, reached cinemas in 2012. Fellow columnist Andy Ihnatko wrote after his death that Cringely, along with John Dvorak, had proven to editors and publishers that there was an audience for tech columnists who made no attempt to hide their personalities and points of view. News of his death reached the top of Hacker News in October 2026.

Books: Three Mile Island (1980, as Mark Stephens); Accidental Empires (1992, revised 1996); The Decline and Fall of IBM: End of an American Icon? (2014).

Television and film: Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires (PBS, 1996); Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet (PBS, 1998); Digital TV: A Cringely Crash Course (PBS, 1998); Plane Crazy (PBS); NerdTV (PBS, 2005 to 2006); Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview (2012).

Stephens claimed to have been Apple employee number 12, a number also claimed by early Apple employee Daniel Kottke. His 1995 dismissal from InfoWorld led IDG to sue him over the Cringely trademark; the case was settled out of court, with InfoWorld keeping the trademark and Stephens allowed to use the name outside competing computer publications. Backers of his Mineserver Kickstarter campaign also complained of long delivery delays, which he acknowledged in public updates.

Mark Stephens died on October 3, 2026, in Charlottesville, Virginia, at the age of 73. The news first spread through a Hacker News post from a family friend, who said he died in his sleep early that Saturday, and was confirmed by an obituary from Hill and Wood Funeral Service published on October 6. No cause of death was made public. His family announced that a celebration of life would be held at a later date and asked that, in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the American Heart Association or the American SIDS Institute.