Background
He was born in Chicago, Illinois.
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Tom Mandel
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Career
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 at San Jose State University and was hired as a futurist by Socially Responsible Investment 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 Socially Responsible Investment and as a senior consultant in Socially Responsible Investment"s Business Intelligence Center.
In addition to his work at Socially Responsible Investment, 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 was 49 years old.
