Mostly written 11 April, 2001

[Marble Logo]

I used to work for a company called Marble. It was named after Marc Elvy, Al Langerman and Bob Brown, who founded it when they were undergraduates at Harvard in about 1983. When I worked there in 1993, it had about 35 really great employees. Unfortunately, three of the four senior partners died in a plane crash in 1994. (It was a private plane that two of them were piloting, here's the official report.) The company hung on for a few years, but is now gone - though the mailing list lives on.

I suppose I built this page mostly for me, it is literally links to the past. If it helps anyone else, I'm glad.

  • The old Marble Associates URL, which doesn't seem to go anywhere anymore.
  • Geoffrey's Tribute Page
  • We were the first customers for Hidden Creek Ranch the year before Marc, Ray and Kirk died. They took us back at the same beta-test rates to help us heal after the accident. The link here has text by Kirk & Michelle Elvy, and Andy Lee.
  • Someone I don't know saved some of the Marble content. I did a little of the really early work on the coporate memory infrastructure project.
    • Why is this a page about the company that died instead of the people that died? I don't know. Maybe it's because Geoffrey already did a page about the people, and knew them better. Maybe it's because all people die, but we also try to do things during our lives first. A lot of people took time out of our careers to try to keep Marble alive after our friends had died. But the company is gone, and the organization of people is drifting apart.

    Updates

    December 2005: Hidden Creek Ranch is no more. www.marble.com (one of the very first registered domain names) now is owned by a marble company (well, at least that's logical!) If there were any get-togethers on the tenth anniversery of the plane crash, I didn't hear about them. I'm sure the web is some kind of metaphor for life, but I can't quite make it. Actually, maybe the web points out more about what's passing than our memories do -- dropped memory links are just gone. On the other hand, the web keeps getting exponentially bigger, and so do the number of companies (& human progeny) of former marble employees. December 2008: It looks like Matthew Stecker has put the old Marble web pages up on a new URL: http://www.marblelegacy.com/. I'm surprised at the constant (though very low) flow of traffic to this site. The web really is an interesting way of seeing how our lives move, change, but also have impact.
    page author: Joanna Bryson