Technology

Never specially wanted a computer but when I started at Newsday I was chained to a terminal with the rest of the the high school sports operators, and once I stopped crying, was hooked. Soon I bought a 286 for my own, but the big revelation was "multitasking" with the 386DX: using XyWrite under OS/2 1.3 in 1991 while FaxWorksPM was sending in the background was jawdropping -- like owning slaves, without the guilt or expense. The next step, joining Compuserve, was enough to make me a smug expert. I scooped the golf world when Jim Frank put me on the internet case for Golf Magazine, got some fun work for Yahoo! Internet Life, wrote a few things for Suck, the great anti-cultural virtual toilet-wall graffiti takedown of the internet culture.

I would like to take credit for the information revolution but it would be truer to say I destroyed the tech economy, at least it felt that way. Early in 2000 I drove to Basking Ridge, NJ to interview the head of Lucent for an airline magazine cover story. She showed up late and woozy, like she'd been nailed with a tranquilizer dart, so her publicist and I had to prop her up through my cuddly questions.  That was January 5 -- next morning I turned on the radio and heard that Lucent had missed its 1999 quarterly, the beginning of the end of the tech bubble. A few months later, after my post-Deja News screed came out in Suck, they went down in flames. You're welcome.