A Brief History of the Internet, Robert Cringely (1998)

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.