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.
That's fair, there's some other stuff that he seems to have verifiably lied about. There's the Lisa stuff you mention, and he lied about being a professor at Stanford when in reality he was either a TA or one level above a TA (sort of like Lex Fridman and MIT). I'm not sure that he'd lie altogether about being an early Apple employee when he was presenting a show that interviewed both Jobs and Wozniak (who would likely see the show and know that he was lying), but who knows.
You might already know this because you seem to know a lot about him, but when I was researching the Lisa claim you brought up I found a CHM oral history with Dan'l Lewin (https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...), where page 20 mentions that Cringely was married to Ellen Nold while she was working on the Lisa project. Maybe that's how he got some of his anecdotes about Apple in the early 80s. EDIT: Cringely's next Apple anecdote in the talk you linked was about AppleLink, and this photo has Nold listed as manager of support programs for AppleLink: https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/ellen-nold-the...
I agree that his tendency to exaggerate his own past is unfortunate but doesn't outweigh all the great journalism he's done.
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.
That's fair, there's some other stuff that he seems to have verifiably lied about. There's the Lisa stuff you mention, and he lied about being a professor at Stanford when in reality he was either a TA or one level above a TA (sort of like Lex Fridman and MIT). I'm not sure that he'd lie altogether about being an early Apple employee when he was presenting a show that interviewed both Jobs and Wozniak (who would likely see the show and know that he was lying), but who knows.
You might already know this because you seem to know a lot about him, but when I was researching the Lisa claim you brought up I found a CHM oral history with Dan'l Lewin (https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...), where page 20 mentions that Cringely was married to Ellen Nold while she was working on the Lisa project. Maybe that's how he got some of his anecdotes about Apple in the early 80s. EDIT: Cringely's next Apple anecdote in the talk you linked was about AppleLink, and this photo has Nold listed as manager of support programs for AppleLink: https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/ellen-nold-the...
I agree that his tendency to exaggerate his own past is unfortunate but doesn't outweigh all the great journalism he's done.