Tom Mandel (1946 – April 6, 1995) was an American futurologist. He was born in
Chicago, Illinois. He dropped out of college twice and served in the
United States Marine Corps in the
Vietnam War for nine months in 1969.
In 1972, he was the first graduate of the "Futures program" at the
University of Hawaii.
He then did some graduate work in
cybernetics
Cybernetics is a wide-ranging field concerned with circular causality, such as feedback, in regulatory and purposive systems. Cybernetics is named after an example of circular causal feedback, that of steering a ship, where the helmsperson m ...
at
San Jose State University and was hired as a
futurologist by SRI International (formerly the
Stanford Research Institute) in Menlo Park, California, in 1975.
Mandel's consulting practice focused on social trend analysis and forecasting for a wide range of consumer products and technology companies, and he published several scenarios reports in collaboration with the Values and Lifestyles (VALS) program at SRI and as a senior consultant in SRI's Business Intelligence Center.
In addition to his work at SRI, Mandel was an editor of
Time Online and "one of the most prolific citizens of the on-line community known as
the Well,"
where he was considered "a central figure."
His experiences in that community became the basis of a magazine article
and a book by
Katie Hafner.
Mandel was "one of the first (if not the first) to share on-line, with a wide audience, his own experience of dying."
On March 25, 1995, he posted on The Well that he was dying of lung cancer. He died eleven days later on April 6, 1995, at
Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...
Hospital, listening to
Beethoven's
Ninth Symphony with his wife Nana. He was 49.
References
External links
Obituaryby
William H. Calvin
William H. Calvin (born April 30, 1939) is an American theoretical neurophysiology, neurophysiologist and professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is known for popularizing neuroscience and evolutionary biology, including the hyb ...
Gerard van der Leun - Memorial* Mandel & van der Leun ''Rules of the Net''
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mandel, Tom
1946 births
1995 deaths
American futurologists
Deaths from lung cancer in Calabria