A Brief History of Robert X. Cringely In 1987, Mark Stephens was hired by Infoworld magazine where he began writing under the name Robert X. Cringely. When he left Infoworld in 1995, Stephens continued using the Cringely name and Infoworld sued him. They eventually reached an agreement where he was allowed to continue using the Cringely name as long as he wasn't working for a competitor of Infoworld. For several years Mark Stephens has claimed that he is "the original Robert X. Cringely". But he isn't. Before he was hired by Infoworld there were at least two other people there who wrote columns using the Cringely pseudonym. At various points in his career, he has also claimed that he was employee number 12 at Apple, he helped them move out of Steve Jobs' garage, and he designed the original Mac trash can icon. None of this is true and there is no credible evidence that Mark Stephens ever worked at Apple. In 2015 Cringely announced "The Mineserver Project" on Kickstarter. These miniature Minecraft servers would be small, inexpensive ARM-based boards, running Linux, slightly more powerful than a Raspberry Pi and selling for $99. The project raised $35,000 and the finished boards were supposed to ship in December 2015. But they didn't. All through 2015 and 2016 Cringely repeatedly promised that the Mineserver boards would be finished and shipped soon. But there was always "one more little problem" that was holding things up. In November 2016 Cringely wrote on his Kickstarter page: "We'll finally start shipping the week after Thanksgiving. Thanks for your patience and support." Nothing was ever shipped, and there were no more updates posted to the Kickstarter project. Ever. In July 2017 Cringely posted on his blog that he was suddenly blind from cataracts, but he would have his sight restored in a couple of weeks, so maybe everyone could stop asking about the Mineserver boards until then. Never mind that nobody has cataract surgery on both eyes at the same time, that's a minor detail. Three months later, Cringely claimed that his house burned down and all the Mineserver boards were destroyed. Just like the cataracts and his tenure at Apple, there is very little evidence that any of this is actually true. In May 2018 Cringely wrote that it would be another 16 months before his insurance company paid him for his house that burned down, and that it might not pay for the melted Mineservers at all. But yet again, he promised, "We're back in the Mineserver business, preparing a successor model because the available boards and other parts have all changed. Every supporter will get their Mineserver before the end of the year." All through 2018 there were repeated promises that money would be found somewhere, and the Mineservers would finally ship. But 2018 ended with nothing. In June 2019, Cringely posted his thoughts on "The Future of Television", with no mention of the Mineservers at all, and he didn't post anything to his blog for the rest of 2019, although he was still posting about airplane trivia on Quora.com. In January 2020, Cringely's latest and biggest tall tale hit his blog when he announced his new business venture called Eldorado Space. This would be a company using F-104 jets to launch satellites. Cringely says revenue from this business will fund his retirement (he was 67 at the time) and give him enough money to finally deliver those Minecraft servers he's been promising for the last 5 years. He also claimed that the business is guaranteed to succeed because his new company has bought all the F-104s in existence, so he won't have any competition. To prove this is all real and legitimate, Cringely found a picture of an F-104 on the Internet and photoshopped the word Eldorado onto it. So ... you can't pay back the $35,000 from the failed Mineserver project, but you can buy a bunch of F-104 jets? The truth and Robert X. Cringely are not well acquainted. As of May 2023, to the surprise of exactly no one, there has been no mention of Eldorado Space since the original blog entry, more than 3 years ago.