Mary Alyce Stephens (Hacker News, Reddit, TidBITS Talk):

Mark Stephens, known to much of the world as Robert X. Cringely, passed away on October 3, 2026. He was 73.

Mark was a gifted writer, journalist, storyteller, husband, father, brother, and friend. To millions of readers and viewers, he was Robert X. Cringely, the witty and sometimes irreverent observer of the technology world. But to those of us fortunate enough to love him, he was simply Mark-and losing him leaves an emptiness that is difficult to put into words.

[…]

Writing as Robert X. Cringely, Mark became a distinctive voice in technology journalism. He had an unusual ability to understand not only technology but also the human beings behind it-the dreamers, inventors, entrepreneurs, eccentrics, and risk-takers who were changing the world. He could take a complicated subject and make it understandable, entertaining, funny, and deeply human.

Steven Sinofsky (via John Gruber):

Bob wrote “Accidental Empires” that chronicled SV and the tech industry of the PC era, 1970s-90s. It led to the highly regarded PBS series “Triumph of the Nerds” a definitive series of interviews of the era. Through that time he authored the “gossip” column” in InfoWorld on the latest goings on at OG PC companies. Everyone read it in print religiously.

See also: I, Cringely and Wikipedia.

Previously:

• Revolution in the Valley

Update (2026-10-20): Paul Tyma (Hacker News):

The next day Bob and I went to Sun Microsystems. He and I sat in a room with Jonathan Schwartz (CEO) and Rich Greene (C-something-else) while they defended Java and gave me nasty looks wondering who the hell I was and why the hell I was even there. They seemed plenty interested in impressing Bob though. By the way, Dotnet didn’t squish Java but I did get a Sun t-shirt.

Janine Liberty (Hacker News, NASA, NYT, WSJ, Slashdot):

Margaret Hamilton, a profoundly influential computer scientist best known for leading the software engineering team at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab during NASA’s Apollo program, died on Sep. 30. She was 90.

A computing pioneer who authored over 130 publications, Hamilton helped to establish software engineering as a dedicated discipline.

[…]

Moments before the Eagle module was set to land on the lunar surface, the onboard computer raised the alarm. It had detected a 1202 error: The computer was overloaded due to a fault in a hardware switch, and it was possible the system would not be able to handle the complex landing procedure.

But Hamilton and her team had engineered priority-driven software, able to shut down unnecessary background tasks in order to prioritize mission-critical tasks. Houston trusted Hamilton’s software and allowed the mission to proceed, and two men walked on the moon for the first time.

Dave DeGraw:

The following is an excerpt from a textbook called Fluency With Information Technology: Skills, Concepts, & Capabilities, 7th Edition ISBN 0-13-444872-3

At the time of publishing, the Wikipedia page for Margaret Hamilton has an important quote about the origin of the term “software engineering”. I was moved by this and wanted to add it to my /quotes page, but needed to verify the source of the quote. I was bothered that the source came from an interview given for an out-of-print textbook that as far as I can tell is unavailable to legally obtain. The interview is also not published in later editions of the book.

Fortunately, I was able to find the complete interview and I am publishing that excerpt here under fair use doctrine for educational, archival, and personal informational purposes only.

The Computer History Museum has an article and a full oral history.

Previously:

• Artemis II’s Fault-Tolerant Computer
• Testing the Apollo Spacecraft
• The Apollo Guidance Computer
• Margaret Hamilton and Apollo 11
• That Would Never Happen

Update (2026-10-14): Jennifer Ouellette:

You’ve probably heard the famous story of how Lorenz kept a continuous simulation running on his LGP-30 computer, and of that fateful 1961 day when he realized that even small differences in starting values could lead to very different outcomes—a sensitivity to initial conditions that is a hallmark of chaos theory, along with strange attractors. You might not have known that it was Hamilton who was responsible for programming the LGP-30.

Computers were still a novelty at the time, and neither Lorenz nor Hamilton had any programming knowledge; they taught themselves. Per a 2019 Quanta article, Lorenz was amused by her unusual methods: For instance, she once bypassed the “clunky debugging process” by rolling the paper tape down the hallway and editing the binary code by hand with a pencil. “I’d poke holes for ones, and I’d cover up with Scotch tape the others,” she recalled.

Ryan Merket (Hacker News, Wikipedia):

Om Malik (@Om), the journalist, GigaOm founder, photographer and True Ventures partner whose work tracked the commercial internet from dial-up optimism to AI saturation, died on June 24 at Stanford Hospital after what his family described as a long health journey with his heart, according to a post on On my Om. He was 59.

[…]

That exchange was small. It was also the whole system in miniature. A founder could reach the editor directly. The editor was awake. The story was not filtered through a communications department, a conference stage or a banked embargo calendar. Malik helped build that operating system for Silicon Valley media: fast, conversational, porous, technically literate and dangerously close to the companies it covered.

Malik was not just one of the people who covered Silicon Valley. He became one of the people Silicon Valley used to understand itself. That was the gift and the complication of his career. He was a reporter, then a founder, then a venture investor, and he never entirely gave up any of those identities. He could spot a network shift early because he had spent decades watching pipes, protocols, business models and human ego interact at close range. He could also be too close to the machine he covered, a tension that defined the blog era he helped build.

[…]

On my Om, became less about scoops and more about judgment. He wrote about technology, photography, business cycles, health, memory and the human cost of living inside the network. He preferred the long arc to the launch post.

We were mutual readers for many years, and I respected him as a thoughtful writer, but I didn’t know him well. He always seemed like a kind soul, and reading the many comments about his passing that really comes across. When he announced the break recently, I hoped he was off to take some more wonderful photos.

Benjamin Clymer:

Through it all, Om Malik was just a kind, warm, funny (af), true, and honest friend who helped me get to the good times and ride out the bad. He’d been through a lot and wasn’t afraid to tell you all about it. He was a rare breed indeed in many ways, but having the confidence to show kindness and vulnerability in the world of venture capital is something that should be studied.

Om Malik (2020):

Given that I have been writing three decades, including eighteen-plus years a blogger, I am hardly surprised that I am repeatedly asked: how should I write? And my answer is always the same — write like a human.

Update (2026-06-29): See also:

• John Gruber (Mastodon, Hacker News)
• Dave Winer
• Daniel Agee
• Adam Chandler
• Rui Carmo
• Jim Nielsen
• Jesper
• Matt Mullenweg
• Rene Ritchie
• Ben Thompson
• Jim Dalrymple
• Clay Risen
• M.G. Siegler

Update (2026-07-13): John Gruber has a great roundup of remembrances.

Raymond Chen:

Tony Krueger is remembered in Wikipedia as the person who ported the game Chip’s Challenge to Windows for the Windows Entertainment Pack. But that’s probably not the code he wrote that touched the most people.

Tony worked on Word 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, then on Word for OS/2 and Word for Mac, then returned to Word 6.0 and several versions beyond that. He probably holds the record for “most versions of Word shipped.”

[…]

Tony made the spell checker much more unobtrusive so that it didn’t interfere with your foreground work. And when it found a problem, instead of waiting for you to trigger a spell check, it immediately drew red squiggles under potentially-misspelled words (and later green squiggles under potential grammatical errors).

Update (2026-06-30): See also: Marcin Wichary and Jon Snader.

A U.F.C. fight on President Trump’s birthday will now double as a capstone for Paramount’s successful effort to secure Justice Department approval for a mega media merger.

A look at the quest to mine the bottom of the ocean for valuable minerals, the connection between light pollution and allergies and more climate news.

© The New York Times

Greenpeace International is arguing under Dutch law that an American pipeline company, Energy Transfer, sought to silence it with a costly lawsuit in North Dakota.

© Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times

Greenpeace International is arguing under Dutch law that an American pipeline company, Energy Transfer, sought to silence it with a costly lawsuit in North Dakota.

I critique the portrayal of the Israel-terrorist binary choice, emphasizing that true followers of Jesus Christ should advocate for peace rather than support wars driven by greed or ideology, instead promote love and coexistence among diverse beliefs.

My painting "Jabalya" depicts the suffering of Palestinian women and children during the Gaza war, advocating for compassion and peace. With significant casualties reported, including many children, the artist emphasizes the dire humanitarian needs of Palestinians. War is a tool of Satan used to depopulate the Earth.

This month, a North Dakota court barred Greenpeace from saying what it wanted in a European court, an unusual move. The environmental group says it is forging ahead.

This month, a North Dakota court barred Greenpeace from saying what it wanted in a European court, an unusual move. The environmental group says it is forging ahead.

© Robin Utrecht/ANP, via Alamy