John Markoff is based in San Francisco as a senior writer for the New York Times where he covers Silicon Valley, computers and information technologies. Before coming to the Times in 1988 he worked for the San Francisco Examiner beginning in 1985. He has also been a writer at Infoworld and in 1984 he was West Coast Technical editor for Byte Magazine. He is the co-author with Katie Hafner of "Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier" (1991) and with Lenny Siegel of the "The High Cost of High Tech" (1985). In January of 1996 Hyperion published "Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw," which he coauthored with Tsutomu Shimomura.

He was named as one of Upside Magazine's Digital Elite 100 in 1996, 1997 and 1998. He has been one of the TJFR list of 100 financial journalist for a number of years. He is currently writing a history of Silicon Valley.