Comment by acomjean
7 hours ago
Offered to be paid with stock, took the cash. As someone who’s first startup is no long in business, and having cash in hand is appealing..
But yeah..
“well for a short time I was an employee of Apple Computer, employee number 12 and one day I helped move materials out of this garage. At the time Steve Jobs said that the company was short of loot so he offered to pay me in company shares, but I held out for the money - my mother still reminds me of that incident.”
Daniel Kottke was Employee #12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kottke
Cringely says here that he worked part-time at Apple for a few months as a graduate student: https://www.pbs.org/nerds/qa4.html . Mark Stephens was at Stanford at the time (he earned his master's in communication in 1979) so this lines up. I think it's entirely possible that Cringely/Stephens was in fact the 12th person hired by Apple, but didn’t get a formal employee number because he wasn't a full-time employee.
But Cringely stated on Triumph of the Nerds that he was literally "Employee #12". Other than this statement of his, there are no other sources to confirm that this was true. There's a very comprehensive list of early Apple employees with evidence to back them up here: https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_early_Apple_Computer_e...
Mark Stephens does not appear anywhere in this list, nor have any other early employees confirmed that he worked there.
Yes, this might have just been a small slip-up on Cringely's part, but the trouble is that he continued to make claims about being employed by Apple that were clearly fabricated. For example, Cringely claimed to have invented the Lisa's trash can icon in this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06M64l7pPIk&t=373s but if you read about the same story from other Apple employees, they don't mention him at all: https://folklore.org/Rosings_Rascals.html
These "tall tales" start to add up, and it becomes very hard to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Cringely was a great writer, a great documentarian, and really wonderful at finding the human stories behind the giants of the personal computer industry. Unfortunately, he also often made up stories about himself that were later found to be untrue. He didn't need to do this, because his work stood on its own. It was just a flaw in his personality.
In any case, this is sad news. Rest in peace, Mark Stephens.
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