For those old enough to believe that 8-bits is a perfectly reasonable size for an integer, Larry O'Brien may be remembered as the Editor of Computer Language and AI Expert magazines. Later, he was the founding Editor of Software Development and Game Developer Magazines. During the dot-com years, O'Brien served in a variety of technical and executive positions at a series of startups whose only commonality was that they all became stop-downs.

Today, O'Brien is known for his writing, which appears in a number of online and print outlets, including DevX, the developer sites of both Intel and AMD, and his "Windows and .NET Watch" column for SD Times. His blog post "Top 10 Things I've Learned About Computers (And Any Episode of 24)" was selected for inclusion in The University of Michigan's "Best of Technology Writing 2007." In addition to writing, O'Brien works as an analyst of the software development industry and as a consultant specializing in architecting and implementing high-performance service-oriented systems.