Slashdot has reported:

Mark Stephens, the technology journalist known by the pen name Robert X. Cringely, died last week at 73. He chronicled the technology industry in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including Bill Gates’ rise, Steve Jobs’ time away from Apple and the beginning of the World Wide Web. Stephens also made the documentary Triumph of the Nerds, based on his bestselling book Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date.

Stephens was not the first InfoWorld columnist to use the Cringely name, but he shaped its persona. He successfully fought to keep the name after leaving the magazine in 1995. Slashdot linked to his commentary over many years, with references dating from 1998 and continuing as recently as this summer, when it covered his startup, 2Brains Inc., which aimed to address large language model hallucinations.

A Slashdot reader identified as Darth Technoid, reader No. 83,199, recalled meeting Stephens in the 1990s while he was still at InfoWorld. “I loved the man,” the reader wrote. “I first met him in the 1990s, while he was still working at InfoWorld, and we became friends immediately. He helped me get a job or two, and he was always filled with crazy (meaning really good) ideas.” The reader added: “I'll miss him and his creativity greatly.”

Cringely answered questions from Slashdot readers in 2000. A January 2020 Slashdot story also described his attempt to launch a space venture, alongside the difficulties he said he faced after going blind and losing his home and business in a fire. In a quotation included in that story, he described himself as “a 67-year-old hack with three minor children” and asked: “How does a 67-year-old hack with three minor children recover from going blind, losing his home and business in a horrible fire (like 2,000 others, we are still fighting with insurance companies), while appeasing an angry crowd of Kickstarter supporters armed with pitchforks and shovels?”

The crowd was seeking delivery of a Kickstarter-funded project to create custom Minecraft servers. Cringely wrote in a blog post that he had looked for venture financing to recapitalize MineServer and started a satellite launch company to fund his retirement. “I am not making this up...” he wrote. He had found a Beverly Hills patron interested in co-investing in the Minecraft servers, but said, “I will have to earn the matching money on my own, which is what I have been trying to do with my other startup, Eldorado Space.”

His subjects and predictions appeared regularly in Slashdot links. Those included his 1999 view of Pirates of Silicon Valley; memories of Three Mile Island in 2009; a 2011 argument that IBM did not invent the personal computer; and predictions in 2019 that Apple would become a financial service and hedge fund, and that broadcast television would end within a decade. Later coverage included his 2020 prediction of widespread layoffs among IT contractors, a 2021 look back at his prediction of “The Death of IT” in 2020, and his 2023 forecast that Moore’s Law would continue because of artificial intelligence.

One especially notable project was Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview, a 70-minute conversation Jobs recorded with Cringely in 1995 during filming for Triumph of the Nerds. Jobs was 40 and working at NeXT after leaving Apple. Only 10 minutes of the conversation aired in the documentary. After Cringely rediscovered the videotape, the full interview was released in theatres in 2012, six months after Jobs died. An online transcript and pirated copies on YouTube have also circulated.