In 1996, Paul Tyma was a Ph.D. student at Syracuse University when the phone rang in his office. The caller, Bob Cringely, said he had just read seven Java books and that Tyma's was the best. Tyma was surprised, since he doubted there were seven Java books on the market. He had written one, which was likely the second to appear, and he was not sure it was the best. Many of Doug Lea's grad students had written books riding the hype around Java, which Lea had helped bring to Sun Microsystems. Cringely clearly knew his audience, and Tyma, a lonely computer geek, was glad for the attention.
Writing a programming book in the 1990s brought little money, but it led to invitations to teach Java at software conferences and then to train teams inside companies. That work led Tyma and a friend to start a Java training company. Tyma admits he lied when Cringely asked whether they did Java programming too. Cringely then hired them to build a system called Pronto, meant to deliver print magazines digitally. A small daemon would download each month's issue during idle connection time and send the PDF to a home printer at 2am. Cringely believed paper magazines would endure, but he thought delivery could change. Funding came from someone in Japan, and Cringely paid the team consistently. Pronto never released in any meaningful sense.
The project began a relationship of about 30 years between Tyma and Cringely, whom he called "Cringe." Tyma had not known of Cringely's book Accidental Empires or his PBS series Triumph of the Nerds. Afterward, Cringely put him on a list of people to receive startup ideas for feedback, which led to many email exchanges. In the past 13 years Tyma had 320 emails with Cringely, many part of long chains, roughly three conversations a year.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing