Bruce Brown

Bruce Brown
Contributing Editor
 
As a Contributing Editor to the Auto teams at Digital Trends and TheManual.com, Bruce Brown reviews e-bikes and covers Formula 1 racing, motorcycles, and general automotive news. These beats fit Bruce because he’s happy when driving any vehicle for which someone will hand him the keys. Writing for the Digital Trends Media Group since 2016, he has also been an active member of the tech news, smart home, and commerce teams.

Bruce started his professional tech writing career in the summer of 1985 when he tested and reviewed 42 dot matrix, inkjet, and early laser printers for PC Magazine. During this period, his jaw was wired shut for 40 days, which made fact-checking phone calls awkward. He wrote for PC Magazine and other Ziff-Davis computer magazines and, eventually, websites, including Computer Shopper, PC Week, Family PC, and Extreme Tech until 2004. In that 20-year stint, he covered everything from PCs and peripherals to the first portable PCs, laptops, tablet PCs, handheld devices, early smartphones, and wireless networking. For eight years, Bruce was also a Contributing Editor for HealthTechInsider.

Bruce didn’t start out in journalism or tech. After graduating from the University of Connecticut as an English major, he was a high school English teacher for 14 years. During that time, he also completed graduate degrees in psychology and counseling from Central Connecticut State University and Saint Joseph University. While still teaching high school, he also taught graduate courses in the Counseling Department at Saint Joseph for six years. In addition, he was a founding member of a six-person counseling practice.

In 1982, Bruce immersed himself in the Wesleyan University Summer Computer Institute after taking a simple BASIC programming workshop from a fellow high school teacher. That fall, he founded the Connecticut Computer Society, a statewide nonprofit organization that aimed to help non-computer professionals understand how personal computers could be useful at school, work, and home. For five years, starting in 1984, Bruce was a member of the Wesleyan University graduate faculty teaching courses in computer applications in business. In 1984, he was also the Director of the summer computer institute.

Drawn to following a career in technology, Bruce quit teaching after finishing the 1982-83 school year and had a two-year contract as a staff computer consultant for a private secondary school. In 1985 he was a founding partner of Soft Industries Corp., a personal computer consulting company whose members consulted with small to medium-sized businesses, taught graduate courses at three different universities, and contributed countless articles to major computer magazines.

Bruce was born in Rockland, Maine, but when he was eight, his family moved to Connecticut. Bruce went to school, got married, and raised three children with his wife, Marge, while living in Connecticut. After an 18-year break in Wilmington, North Carolina, Bruce and Marge moved back to Connecticut to be closer to their five grandchildren. Bruce met his wife on a blind date when he went to show off his first motorcycle to friends when he was a first-year teacher. Thirteen days after they met, Bruce proposed, and she said yes. They married four months later, despite Bruce’s father’s best efforts to convince her that Bruce was not ready for marriage.

Today, Bruce and  Marge live in Windsor, Connecticut, with their double doodle Happy. When Bruce is not chasing deadlines in his full-time writing gigs, he coaches and tutors tech and medical professionals in Brazil, China, Japan, South Korea, and Turkey. In his elusive free time, Bruce likes to cook, paint rocks, ride e-bikes, fight invasive plant species in their yard, and watch his grandchildren play soccer and lacrosse. He is currently binge-reading Robert B. Parker, Elmore Leonard, Ace Atkins, and Mick Herron.