Desmond Crisis

The Cult Leader of the Cyberpunks" - R.Hart, 1994

    Anyone who has lived in the SF Bay Area in the last 5 years has had the chance to listen to CNET radio 910 AM.  It was a great station that was molded for the geeks and to any person interested in technology.  There were many things that also bothered me about the station.  The first being that for a few years almost everything and everyone who called into the show had dot com attached to it.  It would get really annoying listening to 20 and 30 something year olds talking about their NEW dot com business.  How exciting and different it was then anything out there.  Blah, Blah, Blah.  It got really bad when it started to crash.  Taking the last round of investment money and spending it on advertising.  Trying to convience the radio audience that they were the company worth keeping around.  Alex Bennet had his show on in the morning that was worth listening to.  It wasn't until CNET let him go and a year later when the station became an AM Talk Station that he came back on the air and talked about how boring it was getting talking about Technology all the time even though he himself was a technology buff.  After he left, they got Desmond Crisis and another guy to do the morning stint.  Then after a few months it was just the Desmond Crisis show. 

    Desmond Crisis I really ended up liking a lot.  I never caught his early stuff on Tech TV but his radio show was pretty good.  I'm sure most of his listners would agree that we loved it when he would go to town on Monopoly Monster Microsoft.  I bought Mandrake Linux because Desmond had convienced me that the GUI interface and over all installation of Linux had come a long way since a few years back.  I had bought RED HAT 6 many years ago and thought that is was a nightmare to install.  Even Desmond agreed that you really had to know your shit just to install the older versions of GUI LINUX, but with Mandrake it was almost as simple as Windows.  I bought it and agreed.  Desmond wasn't anti Microsoft he just believed that the bully on the block wasn't the only kid in town.  And he really believed that by talking about other Operating Systems on the air, people listening might want to try something different.