He was the only one with both balls and brains. I started reading him by accident, just sort of browsing through Infoworld. I was running Netware and Windows 3.1 at the time and was really championing OS/2 - only Nick had the balls to learn OS/2 (most of the people who downed it didn't have a fucking clue about why it was good) and then actually write about it as it deserved (I remember him wearing out his clicking finger opening windows on PM, after crashing Windows 94.9 by opening a lot of windows, exposing the terrible dependence of Windows 95 on conventional memory and DOS).

Nick is brilliant in knowing what is good and what is not, by experience. He gets the drift, and no one else has, before or since. He was a great, correct journalist. He's like Edward R. Murrow. He reported from the front we were all on.