Here’s my story… or at least the parts they haven’t redacted.

I grew up with computers before they had screens. My dad was an IBM Fellow, which meant our kitchen table discussions were half philosophy, half Fortran. I started coding when I was 11, tapping into the original BASIC system at Dartmouth via time-share hookup, essentially the 1960s version of hacking the mainframe from your bedroom. While other kids were building forts, I was debugging loops.

By the late 1970s, I had joined the microcomputer revolution in San Francisco, back when “micro” didn’t mean phones, it meant machines the size of microwave ovens that made strange noises and occasionally caught fire. I connected one of the first Apple IIs to Stanford’s PDP-10 mainframe, which got me curious about how people and machines might publish together. That curiosity turned into a career.

In the 1980s and 1990s, I was part of a publishing wave that surfed the crest of the personal computer boom. I was one of the founding editors at A+ Magazine, then MacUser, where I created MacUser Labs, back when the lab was literally my living room and the testing scripts were handwritten. We made it up as we went, and it worked. I went on to lead PC Magazine, PC Week, and several other publications under Ziff-Davis. We built product testing labs that defined the benchmarks for the industry. I still get nostalgic when I smell ozone and laser printer toner.

In those years, I got to work with Bill Ziff himself, a rare genius who taught me how media could shape industries without selling its soul. We cooked up publications, CD-ROMs, trade shows, online projects. It was chaotic and magical.

When Wired launched in the early ’90s, I was part of the original brain trust, dreaming up what tech media could be if it wore black turtlenecks and had a philosophical streak. That led to CNET, where I joined the founding team and helped build the bridge between online and television, two media that barely understood each other at the time. I interviewed and wrote about hundreds of people and companies. I also helped get Ask Jeeves off the ground. Back when people thought search engines needed butlers.

After a brief but illuminating stint working with CMP Media’s leadership (and helping them go public), I founded Lumeria, which was part infomediary, part identity management firm, and part fever dream of privacy-first internet architecture. In the years that followed, I launched or led a series of ventures exploring the overlap of communication, privacy, and commerce, PrivateTel, Jaduka, Grabbit.

Somewhere in there, I found time to write over a dozen books, including The Complete IBM Personal Computer, Desktop Publishing, and The Windows Bible series. If you ever bought a copy of Windows 3.1 and wondered what the heck to do next, chances are you read something I wrote. The New York Times called my book “the best” on the subject.

Media was never just a job for me, it was a way to explore what technology does to culture, and vice versa. I was a columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, a contributor to Japan’s EYE-COM, and a voice on NPR’s All Things Considered. I co-hosted On Computers with my pals John Dvorak, Gina Smith, and Leo Laporte, where we talked shop with anyone who’d listen.

In between it all, I studied plants and ecosystems management. I have a botany degree, and once ran one of the first commercial plant tissue culture labs in the U.S., designing aseptic vessels that eventually influenced global labware design. I co-founded an orchid nursery in Maine in the 1970s. I’m I’m the guy who can code a server and tell you the Latin name for a jungle orchid without missing a beat.

These days, I still believe in the future. I’m still deeply engaged in tech and policy, working with forward-thinking companies across AI, biotech, and sustainability. I’ve been contributing to a legacy preservation project for Noam Chomsky which may be available to the public this year. And I’ve consulted for projects involving retinal imaging, fluid dynamics modeling, and even fundraising strategies for national parks. I occasionally serve as an expert witness in technology cases, and I still speak publicly when the topic is juicy enough to get me off the piano bench.

Music is my daily meditation. I compose and improvise on my M-Audio keyboard, often with synths humming. Stay tuned, my podcast is nearing release and I’m always looking for interesting people to interview.

If you’ve read this far, thank you. You now know more about me than most algorithms ever will. And that’s a good start.