Robert X. Cringely is a former columnist for
Info World magazine. He wrote an excellent book
Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date which is an entertaining history of the
personal computer industry. The book was made into a 6 hour
documentary on
PBS starred by Bob called
Triumph of the Nerds. This was later followed by a sequel
Nerds 2.0.1, a history of the
Internet. He now writes a weekly column for the
PBS website (http://www.pbs.org/cringely/) and is PBS's official technology guy - he's made specials on
Digital TV and the
Y2K bug. An pretty cool guy, and he seems to know just about everybody in the computer industry (his interviews with
Steve Wozniak were my personal favorites).
The name Robert X. Cringely is a pseudonym, and Info World sued to retain the name after he left the company. The led to the awkward situation where there's still a column in Info World credited to Robert X. Cringely, but it is written by a woman.
He also made yet another documentary for PBS called Plane Crazy where he attempted to design, build and fly his own plane. It wasn't too successful, but was quite amusing.
In Truimph of the Nerds, he published his real phone number: (415) 525-9270, and invited people to give him a call anytime.