My friend Mark Stephens died last Saturday. Most of the world knew him as Robert X. Cringely. I knew him as the neighbor who stood with me on garage roofs in Sonoma County, pointing dish antennas at distant ridge tops in 2020, because it was not possible to get a broadband internet connection at my location. That is how we became friends, more than 25 years ago. We managed to use directional wifi and created a link to someone that had broadband several miles from my home.
Mark was creative, technically competent and a dreamer. He was a gifted writer and storyteller. One of the few historians of his time to track the development of the computer industry. Sometimes we would dream together. He and his family lived close to our home in Sonoma for many years. He had an amazing family including a wonderful wife, MaryAlyce. Eventually they moved back to South Carolina where is wife had family. With all his moving and all my moving, we did not communicate often but we meant a lot to each other.
When I published my memoir, I asked Mark to write the foreword. He ended it this way: “I believe I know Avram well enough to love the guy.” I want to say the same about him. I wish I could have been near him towards the end of his life so I could have held him and told him what a special person he was.
Below you will find, his obituary, the forward he did for my book, The Flight of a Wild Duck and finally a long interview he did with me for a series on nation television in 2014. It is my favorite interview.
Obituary of Mark Stephens
https://www.hillandwood.com/obituaries/Mark-Stephens?obId=49806651
FOREWORD to the Flight of a Wild Duck
Though our careers in Silicon Valley overlapped by a dozen years, I didn’t meet Avram Miller until shortly after his retirement from Intel in 1999. We were neighbors in the rural Wine Country of Sonoma County, sharing the struggle of using long-distance Wi-Fi as the only alternative to crappy telephone dial-up Internet. We literally goto know each other on garage roofs aiming dish antennas at distant ridge-tops.
Over the subsequent 20 years I came to know Avram, his children and grandchildren, his wife and ex-wife, even Avram’s father, who died a bit more than a year ago. I know most of the people mentioned in this book and I believe I know Avram well enough to love the guy.
Avram is known for his intellect and specifically for his rare habit of asking the question Why? Why do we do things the way we do rather than some other way? In Silicon Valley the operant question for most people is How? not Why? But why is more powerful than how. How is by nature evolutionary while why is revolutionary. The other big proponent of asking why in Silicon Valley was Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, which pretty much makes the point of how important why can be.
Dave House, one of Intel’s most senior executives—a noted asker of How? who worked with Avram at Intel before moving on to become CEO of Bay Networks, an important networking company—once told me at a Computer History Museum event that Avram was crazy “but also the smartest man I ever met.”
Avram Miller co-founded Intel Capital and, by doing so, brought the chip giant into businesses that Intel founders Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore would never have considered on their own. Avram used Intel money to literally create home broadband Internet, even though Intel was not intrinsically a networking company. But the why for Intel and broadband was obvious to Avram if a mystery to those others.
Home broadband drove demand for faster and more powerful processors in home computers, directly driving Intel’s growth and changing both the Internet and the world in the process. Avram Miller did that.
The best part about this book you are about to read is its modesty. It’s the story of an inquiring mind finding its way in the world from very modest beginnings and almost no expectations. Avram’s lifestory is one of choices. Did he want to become a rabbi or a jazz piano player? Did he want to be a neuroscientist or a computer pioneer? All paths were open for Avram because of his ability and his creativity. The world is a better place for the choices he made. Young Avram once rented the space under a baby grand piano for a place to sleep. That’s a modest beginning and yet charming, like Avram, gaining him not only a place to live but also an instrument to play.
Imagine how far he might have gone had Avram been able to afford to live under a concert grand?
—Robert X. Cringely, host of the PBS TV series Triumph of the Nerds, and author of Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date
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