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The Gripe Line | Ed Foster » In memoriam: Ed Foster

July 28, 2008 | Comments: (57)
101 votes

In memoriam: Ed Foster

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We at InfoWorld are sorry to announce that Ed Foster, InfoWorld’s venerable The Gripe Line blogger died this past Saturday. We are all saddened by Ed’s passing but grateful for his 15 years of consumer advocacy in the field of technology products through The Gripe Line column and blog.

Ed has contributed to InfoWorld and the technology-using community at large in many ways during his 20-year association with us, as a reporter, writer, editor, and columnist at InfoWorld.

We will all miss his passion and professionalism.

Ed’s son, Jeff, wanted to share the following with Ed’s readers:

I’m sorry to inform you all that my dad, Ed Foster, died on Saturday of an apparent heart attack. He was 59. He was very proud of the work he had done and the community he had built here. He was very engaged in what you all had to say, and we had many running instant message conversations about comments or emails people had sent. He was an extremely smart man, and he loved to be mentally stimulated, whether it was a good book, an interesting conversation, or one of the many comments you posted that made him look at something in a slightly different way. As you can probably tell, I’m not half the writer my dad was, and it’s very difficult for me to think of the words to say what I feel (it doesn’t help that when I get stuck on a word or phrase, I think “I know, I’ll ask my dad!”), but I just want everybody to know that this site and the people on it meant a lot to him. I’m going to miss him. More then words could express, even if he was here to help me think of them.

We invite you to post your remembrances of Ed and any other sentiments you’d like to express at this time.

Posted by Galen Gruman on July 28, 2008 05:21 PM

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I’m stunned. Ed was always taking the technology vendors to task for all sorts of transgressions. A sigh of relief is comming form all the rip off artist in the technology field because Ed’s gone “off duty”. Ed was one of the few columnists that I followed religiously. Over the last eon it feels like, he and I exchanged emails about one scam or another. Some he even used in the column.  Graciously concealing my identity when I was particularly brain dead and blunder into one scam or another. I feel the loss.

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It also points out the unfairness of Social Security, he paid in for three decades and his family has NOTHING to show for it! It’s robbery by the gang in DC.

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