Ok, I'm going to shame myself in public for this but, I always thought they were "DVORAK keyboards" and they were called this way just like the "AZERTY keyboards", that is, the first 6 letters of the first row were "DVORAK".
tmtvl 1 days ago [-]
There's no shame in not knowing something or inferring wrong conclusions from facts you do know. From left to right the first 6 keys of the top row are:
',.pyf
Which isn't as catchy as Dvorak.
user_7832 1 days ago [-]
Unfortunately python scripts turn out to be not as vulnerable to character escaping exploits.
Character escape, in this context, of course, refers to the keys themselves flying out of the keyboard, this being a hardware product and all.
tmtvl 1 days ago [-]
Did you reply to the wrong comment? I can't see anything here to do with either Python or hardware.
spixy 1 days ago [-]
quick search shows that .pyf is some Python file (interface between Python and Fortran) so it was a joke I guess
23 hours ago [-]
user_7832 7 hours ago [-]
It was a bad joke, a .py and an apostrophe character reminded me of an SQL injection escape.
...Yeah I don't work in SQL if it wasn't obvious lol
ninju 23 hours ago [-]
Or on a US keyboard its known as QWERTY :-)
teekert 1 days ago [-]
Uhm TIL…
SirFatty 2 days ago [-]
He was the creator of Cranky Geeks. One of the first podcasts I listened to.
thisisnico 1 days ago [-]
This is really sad. I used to listen to Cranky Geeks religiously when I was younger. I was always excited about a new episode. I still remember many of them. I remember them talking about web 2.0 and what that means, talking about twitter, and tweeting. A lot of good information and laughs over the years. He will be in my memories.
jmspring 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
ajmurmann 2 days ago [-]
I used to listen to No Agenda from episode 1 on. It literally was just John and Adam recording their regular phone calls, discussing dinners they had together, etc. Over time it became more and more of what I'd describe as a conspiracy podcast.
No Agenda, John and Adam will forever have a special place in my heart regardless of the show eventually putting me off. Adam was what first brought my attention to Second Life where I ended up randomly meeting my now wife. We ended up listening to early No Agenda during long car rides. During one of the episodes John and Adam talked about their visit to Chez Spencer near our home in SF. We checked it out and loved it and later had our wedding rehearsal dinner there. Thank you, John!
rbanffy 2 days ago [-]
He was often wrong.
imdsm 2 days ago [-]
How wonderful to be human, and to be able to have your own political views and opinions such that you could be, subjectively, wrong. We can all only hope to one day also have our own opinions and proudly be wrong.
duzer65657 2 days ago [-]
so this cuts both ways. You voluntarily publish your "beliefs" widely and publicly, be prepared to be called on it. Most of us choose not to do this, but if you want to exert influence you are held inviting criticism.
twoodfin 2 days ago [-]
You’ll note that the comment above was not “criticism” or argument of any meaningful kind.
It simply flagged that he was on the “wrong team”.
rbanffy 1 days ago [-]
There's nothing wrong in being wrong. I'm often wrong, and I'm very happy when I learn something and cease to be wrong about that.
If you take the political views angle, up to 2005 or so, I was very much for small State and liberal economics, but, over the years, I observed the results of assistance programs for vulnerable populations, industrial policies that developed entire regions, and other measures that ensured more opportunities for upwards social mobility, especially for populations that were often excluded from that. Then, in 2015, a coup came, that ousted a left-wing president and demolished most of those policies. Then a far-right president finished demolishing what was left.
At this point, I am very left-leaning because of this. I have seen what injustices do, and how we can eliminate them - and it's not even hard to do so. If even a relatively poor country such as Brazil can do that, anyone can.
DonHopkins 1 days ago [-]
>There's nothing wrong in being wrong.
That is highly dependent on what you're wrong about, and if you change your beliefs based on evidence, and how many people you try to influence to believe your wrong beliefs.
rbanffy 1 days ago [-]
There's nothing wrong about being wrong, unless you try to force others to live under your own wrong assumptions. He didn't do that.
Danox 2 days ago [-]
RIP he was highly skeptical, not necessarily open to the long range view.
rbanffy 1 days ago [-]
What made him useful for a set of things made him wrong for another. That's kind of being human - you don't judge by evidence alone, but also on your previous experiences and biases.
lorreyfum 2 days ago [-]
Centrist libertarian. Absolutely fun and amazing insight.
shmoe 2 days ago [-]
Meh, none of that includes the conspiracy bullshit. I liked Jon, but I didn't like where he went in the last decade or so.
nosrepa 2 days ago [-]
I like that his Wikipedia page really sells that he was a Kentucky Colonel. That was one of the easier titles I've gotten.
samplatt 1 days ago [-]
How did you get it? ... How many titles do you have?!
I know there's people like Sir David Attenborough who have three alphabets worth of letters after their name, but I hadn't considered the idea of gaming the system to get superfluous titles.
appstorelottery 1 days ago [-]
Hey rosrepa... I want to go down your rabbit hole & collect some titles... would you be kind enough to recommend some easy ones to start with?
voidUpdate 1 days ago [-]
The Universal Life Church has an online form to get ordained as a minister, that's an easy one to get
tosti 1 days ago [-]
Hurricane Electric has dead simple IPv6 certification
DonHopkins 1 days ago [-]
The Alonzo Church of the Eval Genius has a self evaluation program sponsored by the Y Combinator. I anonymously passed myself to myself -- until a fixed point!
echelon 2 days ago [-]
This is sad.
I grew up watching his show on Tech TV and reading his columns in PC Magazine.
He used to butt heads with Leo Laporte and it was great:
I enjoyed John and Leo butting heads. I agree that it was great. It's a bummer they haven't done that for a long time.
lorreyfum 2 days ago [-]
It was great until Leo went off the deep end and lost 99% of his audience.
atonse 1 days ago [-]
I used to listen to so many TwiT podcasts 10+ years ago. But then slowly lost interest and I don't remember why.
But they used to be awesome. FLOSS weekly, Security Now, MacBreak Weekly, etc.
But a few years ago, I found out there were some scandals at TwiT, etc, but the network still seems to be going on though.
sixothree 23 hours ago [-]
The last place I listened to Leo was that security podcast I think Leo hosting with Steve Gibson. And it just seemed devoid of any useful information whatsoever. Then one day I decided if I don't learn something I can use at work during my entire drive to work, I'm just not listening again. And that was that.
boyter 2 days ago [-]
When Leo cut off Dvroak and CJal I turned out. You really do need that sort of personality for people to bounce off otherwise its less entertaining.
lizardking 1 days ago [-]
Is CJal here supposed to be JCal by chance? I feel like that was close to 15 years ago, but I'm in the same boat. I used to listen to almost every show Twit put out, which was quite a bit.
etempleton 2 days ago [-]
Both of them kind of lost the thread. I really enjoyed the show but they became increasingly polarized and unmoving in their opinions.
teekert 1 days ago [-]
IMHO they both went a bit too far. Used to love Twit (with JCD), used to love NoAgenda (when they were still relatively politically neutral), I guess it mirrors a bit what happened to their country.
RIP BuzzKill.
robertoandred 1 days ago [-]
Deep end how?
lorreyfum 1 days ago [-]
It’s no tech all lecture about evil nobody wants to listen to that shit.
echelon 2 days ago [-]
I didn't stick around that long to see what became of it.
I see different people saying different things about Leo and John. What happened?
etempleton 2 days ago [-]
I think their butting heads eventually got on both of their nerves. John would derail the show just to get under Leo’s skin. And Leo became increasingly ridged with the show structure. The show was losing popularity and I think some guests said they didn’t like John because he was cranky and his politics, but the real issue was probably that the studio was no longer as convenient for people to get to.
At the same time they both became increasingly politically polarized. John C Davorak became a full right wing conspiracy theorist. Leo increasingly embraced the left wing ideology of the moment.
boyter 2 days ago [-]
It came to a head with that story about the kid making a clock and getting in trouble. Leo was all in on one side that it was about racism and such, with John suggesting he fell for a media lie.
I think John turned out to be right in the end. They did seem to patch things up with John appearing on a episode years later I think "a christmas miracle" was the title, but that was the last time he was on as far as I know.
silisili 1 days ago [-]
Same...well I'll always remember it as ZDTV. Maybe it was my youth, but I remember how exciting tech was then - cool new websites, gadgets, services, etc.
I haven't followed him much since, and seeing his recent pictures made me realize how much time has passed since those days.
Rest in peace, sir.
dc786 17 hours ago [-]
I watched ZDTV, later renamed Tech TV, on my big ugly satellite dish.
Dvorak's show was called Silicon Spin. John had a panel of guests, sort of like the original Meet the Press with Lawrence E. Spivak.
I also listened to a weekly public radio show named Real Computing. John would interview entrepreneurs about their new tech products. I think about 3 interviews per show. The station which carried Real Computing in Albuquerque was KANW, 89.1 FM.
I never heard of No Agenda until this Hacker News piece, and it seems to me Silicon Spin and Real Computing were probably much more worth my time, so I didn't miss much in my ignorance of No Agenda.
I miss the older shows, and I would have appreciated more similar appearances by John since, but those days are gone. RIP.
Brian_K_White 2 days ago [-]
And Leo will say nothing but nice things about him and express nothing but regret when he talks about this on the next episode.
I am not sure John would have done the same.
atlanta90210 1 days ago [-]
I promise you John would have been sad. Their differences are similar to why half the country dislikes the political views of the other half of our country. They both were tech nerds at heart and they both are treasures even with Leo’s TDS.
jibal 1 days ago [-]
The only "TDS" is Trump devotion/defense syndrome.
sixothree 23 hours ago [-]
Maga all seem pretty derganged to me.
CyberDildonics 2 days ago [-]
Why take this to a place of insults and divisive antagonizing?
atlanta90210 1 days ago [-]
It’s ok I am sure John would appreciate the discussion. They both are treasures.
Brian_K_White 1 days ago [-]
As a counter to the many comments I saw implying that Leo is mostly to blame for their disagreements and "banned" John. Those "insults and divisive antagonizing" came first, and which I notice you did not object to, curiously.
I liked them both too. And I listened to No Agenda for a while, and my opinion is based on years of hearing and reading them both.
prvc 1 days ago [-]
There does not seem to be a documented close lineal connection between August Dvorak and composer Antonín Dvořák, although it would be reasonable to suppose some relation exists.
gasgdsadgfa 1 days ago [-]
There's also no documented close lineal connection between John C. Dvorak and August Dvorak, any more than his birthplace being Los Angeles. Both of which are blindly-repeated, unsourced (and untrue) Wikipedia inventions.
jl6 1 days ago [-]
Wikipedia sources the claim to an article by Jerry Pournelle in BYTE magazine, from 1985.
"I'm told there is a relationship, but I can't prove it."
John knows who his uncles are. His father is Walter Charles Dvorak born in Minneapolis to John Steve Dvorak (also born in Minneapolis). August Dvorak and all of his siblings (none of them Walter) were all born in McLeod County to IMMIGRANT Joseph Dvorak. If there's a connection it goes back to Bohemia.
jl6 4 hours ago [-]
Is that from the San Francisco Examiner? Do you have sources for the family information you mention?
DonHopkins 1 days ago [-]
Wait, you mean the Dvorak keyboard isn't named after the order of its letters like Querty??!
How are you supposed to remember it then?
Or is there also a keyboard inventor named Querty?
dyauspitr 1 days ago [-]
Interesting, that’s the only way I thought I knew this man.
moffkalast 2 days ago [-]
August Dvorak's father's, brother's, nephew's, cousin's, former roommate.
olyjohn 2 days ago [-]
So... what does that make him?
lowmagnet 2 days ago [-]
John C. Dvorak
Centigonal 2 days ago [-]
That tiny 1"x1.5" thumbnail[1] of John C. Dvorak in PC Magazine was the essence of Gravitas for me as a kid.
I used to transcribe his articles to a text file and post them to Usenet. Fond memories of that time.
reaperducer 2 days ago [-]
I used to transcribe his articles to a text file and post them to Usenet.
Thank you for your service.
People like you were how people in other countries learned about technology and of other cultures in the days before the internet.
Some person (people?) would post scripts from Red Dwarf on one of the networks years before the show became available televisually in the United States. I used to devour those and laughed and laughed and laughed. That kind of British humor comes through well as text.
405126121 1 days ago [-]
You expect me to read a TV show?! Smeg off!
teepo 22 hours ago [-]
I just spent an hour on-line reading that PC Magazine from December 1999. Amazing that it's over 227 pages. There's a piece on portable CD-RW drives, and the ads, the classifieds section, a lot to take in during that epoch at the end of the 90's. I miss those big spread ads from Compaq and CDW. But my favorite piece in this issue is the "technical excellence awards" feature. They highlight this new webapp called "Google": https://archive.org/details/PC-Mag-1999-12-14/page/110/mode/...
burnte 23 hours ago [-]
Ditto, I learned a tremendous amount from him. I read everything he wrote in the 90s when I was coming into the industry.
arm32 2 days ago [-]
What a legend.
2 days ago [-]
mlinhares 2 days ago [-]
same, read a lot of what he wrote back then.
chrisnet 17 hours ago [-]
nobody appreciates dramatic lighting anymore
ColdStream 2 days ago [-]
Credit to him, he always had a bold take.
One of the funniest things he used to do was write draft reviews of software simply by looking at the back of the box. He said you could get it like 90% right just doing that, I was a different era.
I also remember Leo Laporte constantly trying to take his phone back of him as John was trying to guess his passcode or unlock pattern based on the screen smudges.
Didn't agree with him at lot but he always brought something to the table.
donatj 2 days ago [-]
Most of what I know him for was coming on TWiT, driving Leo Laporte nuts, and making claims that ended up not coming true.
He was a hilarious curmudgeon. He will be missed.
acomjean 2 days ago [-]
Curmudgeon is the perfect term to describe.
He was a great part of TWIT. I liked his obscure software references (lotus Jazz was one I think).
He also found this new thing is like that old thing.
His non positive takes were a great addition to the show.
donatj 2 days ago [-]
When Leo banned him is actually when I stopped listening to TWiT. Apparently he came back a few years later, but I never did.
atlanta90210 1 days ago [-]
Leo finds out on air of John’s passing and is very respectful. Thank you Leo.
I listened to his many pontifications about net-neutrality at that time.
His concern was not the theory and practice of "net-neutrality".
It was that "net-neutrality" was being used by various industry lobbyists and politicians at that time to justify the creation of a definition of "lawful traffic".
By their definition, only "lawful traffic" would be subject to neutrality.
Traffic that was not deemed "lawful traffic" would not be treated the same and could be shaped and blocked.
It was at the time that Pirate Bay was under constant legal attack (2015) and BitTorrent was the "unlawful traffic".
IMO this was a good take that not many journalists paid attention to.
drewnick 16 hours ago [-]
Thank you for giving us this nuance.
0o_MrPatrick_o0 1 days ago [-]
The tech world needs good heels! His worst takes were some of his best!
atlanta90210 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
OrangeMusic 1 days ago [-]
"Having TDS" is a ridiculous notion, please stop using that phrase.
sulam 1 days ago [-]
You really aren’t going to get very far intellectually with a rigid ideology that equates disagreeing with Trump to a mental illness. I’ll happily admit that Trump is right about some things, whether or not you’ll admit that he is wrong about some others.
CaptWillard 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
sixothree 23 hours ago [-]
> to anything Trump does or says
I can't think of many things he has said that I would agree with. On top of that he's usually angry and spiteful in pretty much everything he says. Why would I not be in constant opposition to that?
23 hours ago [-]
CaptWillard 15 hours ago [-]
>On top of that he's usually angry and spiteful in pretty much everything he says.
Are you really under the impression that's the truth?
jibal 1 days ago [-]
The only "TDS" is Trump devotion/defense syndrome.
elzbardico 1 days ago [-]
Stop fighting because of that buffon, folks.
There's no TDS (whatever version of it you like). Trump himself is the disease.
But yes, right-wing people still defending him, because he may still speak something they like about some issues, is like an abused partner telling the doctors in ER: "but he is a good husband"
dpedu 1 days ago [-]
Trump is the symptom; the "disease" is whatever causes people to want him running the country over some traditional politician.
jibal 9 hours ago [-]
You yourself pointlessly joined the "fight". The anonymous downvotes on my comment are themselves demonstrations of Trump devotion/defense syndrome.
rbanffy 2 days ago [-]
> lotus Jazz
I actually remember that.
VCFundedGenYer 24 hours ago [-]
He was the original "uncle who still runs Windows <3.1/95/98/XP> long after support ended because 'Nothing newer is better'" guy.
He pulled one apart and couldnt put it back together for the rest of the episode :-)
ghaff 2 days ago [-]
He was a very readable columnist for PC Mag among other places. He was also more focused on being interesting and at least a bit provocative than being correct.
>He was a hilarious curmudgeon.
Agreed.
duzer65657 2 days ago [-]
>> He was also more focused on being interesting and at least a bit provocative than being correct.
So exactly like everyone today, but also interesting?
smackeyacky 2 days ago [-]
He set the style of being confidently incorrect. At least he was entertaining.
smoyer 1 days ago [-]
He would make a great AI!
ghaff 2 days ago [-]
Probably. With some exceptions, he wasn't flat out wrong. But he did push the boundaries from time to time.
fraXis 2 days ago [-]
Too bad him and Leo had a falling out years ago. I really loved watching those two together. I remember John was always borrowing Leo's equipment, such as camera lenses, and he would always forget to bring them back and Leo would always scold him for that.
ColdStream 1 days ago [-]
Absolutely, that was some of the best years of Twit.
adamrezich 1 days ago [-]
Listening to podcasts on an iPod era
foo42 1 days ago [-]
or netcasts even
dylan604 2 days ago [-]
> by looking at the back of the box. He said you could get it
Well that is definitely something different about today's software websites. How many times have you looked at a company's website for a product/service and still left wondering what it did?
malfist 2 days ago [-]
When product websites are more focused on getting investors than customers the whole system breaks down
adamrezich 2 days ago [-]
> he always had a bold take
Often quite literally, in his PC Magazine columns!
rbanffy 2 days ago [-]
His most hilarious predictions that were almost always wrong.
ChickeNES 2 days ago [-]
I laughed at one I happened to spot recently, where he confidently said that Compaq would license Micro Channel from IBM according to "sources".
antonvs 2 days ago [-]
It’s amusing how nerdy IBM was back then: “Oh we’ve come up with a better bus design! Why isn’t everyone flocking to buy our product?”
rbanffy 23 hours ago [-]
The MCA bus didn't hurt PS/2 sales that much. Of course, you wouldn't be able to get cheap expansion boards for them because MCA, but they had VGA, mouse, floppy, hard-disk, printer and serial ports, which is what the bulk of expansion boards were used for. What really killed them was that the ISA-based PCs were kind of better, and cost less.
OTOH, I think that the Sound Blaster and the VGA card are the biggest factors in the Amiga's demise. From a user's standpoint (a user who doesn't care about planar graphics, a blitter, and so on), the PC had better graphics and sound, for less, and with all their software still available. Being a peripheral, the graphics on the PC were much easier to change and evolve, and quickly surpassed the Amigas, that had to preserve compatibility with what was, at that point, hardware getting less competitive.
adamrezich 2 days ago [-]
He was right about the mouse, in the long run.
_-_-__-_-_- 2 days ago [-]
I'm 36, I've been an intense podcast listener and tech news reader since I was 14 years old. In 2005, I discovered This Week in Tech where John C. Dvorak was a frequent early guest. I liked his style and found other podcasts and websites where I could find his content. I really enjoyed Cranky Geeks. For fans, here is the No Agenda newsletter link with current information: https://mailchi.mp/nashownotes/rip-jcd-no-agenda-newsletter.
bonsai_spool 2 days ago [-]
Wow, you’re my twin! I’d watch these on XBMC/Xbox Media Center with some other video podcasts - it was a magical moment in tech
teeray 2 days ago [-]
Triplets :) I’m also 36 and loved listening to early TWiT and Security Now on the bus in high school. Early SN computing deep dives were a crucial part of my early Comp Sci education.
93po 2 days ago [-]
Same as me and very close to same age. Started with TWiT podcasts plus Buzz Out Loud with Molly Wood and Tom Merrit. On my iPod nano second gen. Got exposed to John through TWiT and startd listening to No Agenda, and still do. I massively disagree with the politics of John and Adam and frankly find some of what they say to be hate speech, and don't endorse their podcast because of that. But I still listen to it in the background and skip the problematic parts because I frankly just like hearing their voices after listening to it twice a week for 20 years.
I think John is a product of his generation and environment. Adam too. I don't think they're bad people, but very misguided in some ways. Despite that I am very sad to see John has passed. I really admired his dedication to the show and schedule for so long. He was a true professional in his craft.
I owe a lot to Adam and John in terms of entertainment, comfort, and contributions to my worldview from a young age.
In 1984, while arguing that Apple’s new Macintosh might fail, Dvorak wrote:
“The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse.’ There is no evidence that people want to use these things.”
It's a shame John didn't live to see his prediction come true - I think we're very nearly there as AI starts to do most of our interfacing with computers instead of mouse and keyboard.
tylerak 2 days ago [-]
Buzz Out Loud was also my first podcast, and my gateway to TWiT, Cranky Geeks, and more. I sent Tom Merritt a note (he currently hosts a daily tech news podcast).
alexissantos 1 days ago [-]
Quintuplets! 36 here and had a similar story of listening to John on TWiT way back when! I stopped listening to No Agenda about 10 years ago, though. Sad to hear of his passing.
sadsach 22 hours ago [-]
39 reporting in, John is the only personality I kept tabs on from those early days. While like many here, I took issue with some of the content on No Agenda, I still listened to quite a few shows even quite recently. He and Adam could get into vicious on air battles, but in the end you could tell they deeply respected and cared for each other. I'll miss his rants and his strong (and frequently wrong) opinions.
1 days ago [-]
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 2 days ago [-]
Heh, my trajectory exactly.
maximinus_thrax 2 days ago [-]
Oh man, this nostalgia hit me hard. I was an avid listener to both This Week in Tech and Cranky Geeks. I remember I was watching (!!!) Cranky Geeks on my ipod when I was bedridden from surgery in 2008.
RIP.
mrandish 2 days ago [-]
I had many lovely dinners with John back in the 90s (he loved Chez Panisse). While his public persona could occasionally be curmudgeonly, in person he was a warm-hearted, passionate computing enthusiast.
barney54 2 days ago [-]
This is exactly who it sounds like Dvorak was. I never got to know him like that, but being a public curmudgeon, but private warm-hearted person is a pretty great compliment.
mrandish 2 days ago [-]
For sure. I got to know John after meeting him in our respective roles as 'journalist writing about startup' and 'young startup entrepreneur'. As we got to know one another well enough to hang out after trade show hours, he gave me pretty invaluable insights and perspective on how to think about the evolving computer industry.
So many people who have big personalities on the internet are like that. My example is Erik Naggum. I spent a lot of time with him and the gulf between his in-person and on-line personas was vast.
I’m not sure what I expected the first time I met him, but I wasn’t too surprised that he was actually easy to get along with. Most intelligent people actually are in real life.
Yes, he could be harsh online, but he also had a sense of humor about the persona he had created for himself online. And it was a persona. That doesn’t mean he was tolerant of stupidity, or what he saw as stupidity, in real life, but face to face there was a passion and a sense of humor that got filtered away by having lots of infrastructure between you and him.
We disagreed on many things. Some of them, in retrospect, he was right about. And we had many heated discussions (mostly entirely in private - neither of us needed an audience to turn the heat up in a discussion). I remember him fondly, I miss talking to him and I was very sad when he passed. I still think about him.
aidenn0 1 days ago [-]
Had he acted in real life the way he did on c.l.l, I strongly suspect he would have been punched a lot more often. Certainly one eulogy I read of him led with the sentence: "Erik Naggum was the first person I killfiled in GNUS." On the other hand, I have heard only good things from people who interacted with him one-on-one though (whether in-person or electronically).
His technical content was almost always high-quality, but one would often need to first don one's Nomex suit to get to said content.
taylodl 2 days ago [-]
First it was Jerry Pournelle and now it's John Dvorak. I read those columns religiously back in the day. I just realized I no longer read anyone religiously, listen to podcasts for any length of time - there's something about the buzz of 80s computing that has been totally lost. That's not necessarily a bad thing, I think it just means the industry has matured. But boy oh boy! The immature industry was a lot of fun!
brucehoult 2 days ago [-]
Pournelle was good as a kind of (relatively) non-technical user in the early days (70s, early 80s) who just wanted to use computers to write books.
Dvorak was quite good, but for me much too oriented towards the Wintel world.
And then there was another guy who was sooo consistently bad I referred to him as Less Than Thorough. I'm not sure now whether he was also the MIT economist who died in 2016.
Robert X. Cringely (Mark Stephens, not those later writing at IDG under that name) was by far the best of the bunch, though was somewhat late starting writing columns only in 1987. He knew his stuff, correctly predicted trends etc. And continues to today at cringely.com, so that's a 40 year tech pundit career so far.
dredmorbius 2 days ago [-]
I referred to him as Less Than Thorough...
Almost certainly Lester Carl Thurow (May 7, 1938 – March 25, 2016).
I've read that sobriquet a few times myself. I suspect his economic ideas were more premature than wrong.
brucehoult 1 days ago [-]
I've never read any of his economics (didn't know until today that he was one) and formed an opinion based only on his tech press writing. Interesting that he was on the board of TSMC!
> I suspect his economic ideas were more premature than wrong.
I don't think economics is a time-dependent field.
Apparently he favoured more government involvement in industry, which I believe has rarely if ever worked out well anywhere. Government officials are very very bad at predicting what will actually work or sell well, are too risk-averse to back the true winners preferring CYA to prove that failure wasn't predictable or their fault, no real skin in the game so easily swayed by dinners and sports tickets and personal favours, and almost always double down on failed ideas and companies rather than admitting they got it wrong.
Provide a safety net for individuals, by all means, but not for companies.
dredmorbius 1 days ago [-]
Re: ...more government involvement in industry,...
See the American School of Economics (19th century), China from Deng onward, industrial policy in Japan (Meiji Restoration, post-WWII), Germany (pre- and post-WWII), Israel, South Korea (post-WWII, particularly 1970 onward), the US (particularly FDR/WWII, also Cold War and much since), just off the top of my head. Whilst it's quite true that government involvement can go bad, it can also go quite well, and as with many matters, the distinction generally isn't between regulation and no regulation, but effective vs. ineffective regulation.
If you read Adam Smith, you'll find that much of what he inveighs against is actually economic power compounding upon itself to interfere with what would otherwise be more productive economic organisation and activity. Protectionism and monopolisation (Smith's term was engrossment) have been harmful for many centuries. A more recent but fascinating account was compiled by Bernhard J. Stern in 1937, published as "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations": <https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag...>. Markdown (my own effort): <https://rentry.co/szi3g>.
Corporations are also very bad at predicting what will actually work or sell well, are risk averse, practice CYA, and ... seek to sway those susceptible to dinners, sports tickets, and personal favours, etc., etc., etc.
There may even be a role for safety nets for companies, as operational concerns, but in which investors remain at risk. That is, yes, if your country is fundamentally reliant on, say, a well-functioning electrical (or other) infrastructure, banking / finance sector, pharmaceutical industry, manufacturing network (especially networks of smaller parts suppliers and service providers), then act to stabilise these when exogenous factors other than superior competition threaten them, but don't bail out the investors. Money can be sourced from elsewhere, but capital equipment, institutional knowledge, and market relationships can be easily destroyed and take many years or decades to restore, if at all.
ghaff 1 days ago [-]
Well, Dvorak was primarily a writer for PC Mag for many years so that was pretty natural.
pantulis 1 days ago [-]
Fortunately Jon Udell is still pretty much alive and kicking.
bborud 1 days ago [-]
The immature 1980s industry was a lot more fun than any decade since. The problem with the future is that when it arrives it tends to bring amazing things, but they are still executed in a way that is disappointing, annoying and clumsy.
I remember thinking in the early 1980s, when I struggled to get my first dot matrix printer to work with an old instrumentation computer that in the future printers will just work. And then the future came and printers became orders of magnitude more frustrating to use — let alone own.
And I remember the early days of the internet and later the web. How much more fun it was. Now the Internet is this annoying, enshittified sewer that I have to tolerate in my life. If I could I would have preferred for it to not play any part in my life anymore. I can understand that most people who were born later than me can’t imagine life without the Internet. This is people’s lives now. But I can still remember what it was like to be entirely free. To have more real relationships with people you liked.
I used to think people who got rich and left the tech world to pursue more “offline” interests were perhaps a bit nutty. Now I understand where they come from. The ultimate privilege today is to not have to care, to not take part, to just drop off the face of the world/internet.
I need only open my email to be reminded of how little I want to be online.
speak_plainly 2 days ago [-]
Rest in Peace, John.
It looks like Adam Curry and John’s wife Mimi will be hosting an episode of No Agenda tomorrow to share stories and anecdotes in remembrance.
Dvorak hated that for decades wikipedia had the wrong birth year and refused to let him change it. He wrote at length about how wikipedia is the antithesis of the entire conception of a wiki. He was 80, born in 1946.
jhgb 2 days ago [-]
I found very quickly an NYT article from 1993 that listed his date of birth as "April 5, 1952". I don't know if that's the source for the Wikipedia article but that info has been around for a long time, it seems.
throw7 2 days ago [-]
It seems a lot of people that read about their bio on wikipedia feel the same way. In fact, it's hard not to be suspicious of those that don't.
ajmurmann 2 days ago [-]
This is odd. So you are saying wikipedia kept getting it wrong for a long time but now the announcement has it wrong and wikipedia is correct?
justin66 2 days ago [-]
I cannot imagine why you find the statements above odd but compare and contrast:
Enough scrolling through the edit history and you could determine when wikipedia finally got their shit together on his birthdate.
Randomno 1 days ago [-]
It was changed to '46 today
antonvs 2 days ago [-]
The odd part is that the announcement used the same erroneous date that Wikipedia used to have. Perhaps someone forgot to refresh their cache for a couple of years.
aidenn0 1 days ago [-]
More likely they wrote the obit several years ago. That's not uncommon.
ajmurmann 20 hours ago [-]
And didn't bother updating the age in a 2-sentence announcement?
2 days ago [-]
mmooss 2 days ago [-]
> He wrote at length about how wikipedia is the antithesis of the entire conception of a wiki.
Their podcast is one of the last bastion of independence: no ads, all funded, produced, developed, self hosted by a group of volunteers.
mvdwoord 23 hours ago [-]
Same here... very saddened by this news. Regular listener to the No Agenda podcast. Will miss that voice dearly. I guess this will also mean the end of the No Agenda podcast is near.
greatquux 2 days ago [-]
Damn.. images of glossy PC Magazines that I used to read are filling my head.. growing up in the 80s & 90s with computer building and reselling as the family business, and just being excited about new technology, and he was a part of that.
chollida1 2 days ago [-]
Oh man, that's an old school name.
I miss cranky geeks, to the point where I've gone back to listen to older episodes.
WalterBright 2 days ago [-]
> I miss cranky geeks
Read my cranky posts about what an abomination Unicode has become!
ChrisMarshallNY 2 days ago [-]
I miss them so much, I became one!
otterley 2 days ago [-]
How can you miss cranky geeks when HN is full of them?
rbanffy 2 days ago [-]
We miss each other.
But it’s ok. We’ll meet again at the great Apple Store in Heaven.
In heaven, macOS is GNU-licensed. GPL3+, nothing less.
robocat 2 days ago [-]
Hell gets Windows.
rbanffy 1 days ago [-]
In Heaven, even Windows is under GPLv3+. That's why nobody uses it.
panzagl 2 days ago [-]
Apple Store? Surely you mean Babbage's.
rbanffy 1 days ago [-]
The Weird Stuff Warehouse also didn't close their Heaven branch. I heard they are running a promotion on Tektronix calligraphic display terminals. In heaven, they are still being made and now have fast ethernet connections, as well as serial.
krapp 2 days ago [-]
Careful, it's against the guidelines to be a cranky geek now.
antonvs 2 days ago [-]
So that’s why it keeps telling me I’m posting too fast.
krapp 2 days ago [-]
You turn that frown upside down this instant.
abraxas 1 days ago [-]
I'm going to post something that contradicts this outpouring of fondness for the late Dvorak. While I did enjoy his friendly curmudgeon act in the days of TWiT, I was very dismayed by him jumping in bed with that paranoid crackpot and I blame him for a lot of toxic ideas that he helped spread in his No Agenda show years. Maybe his earlier act was the mask and the latter John C Dvorak was the real persona. Or maybe the other way around. I'll never know. But I can't celebrate his life because of what he decided to do with it in his latter years.
1 days ago [-]
basisword 1 days ago [-]
I remember him from listening to TWiT in the 00's/10's so I'm out of the loop. Who's the paranoid crackpot?
pantulis 1 days ago [-]
Guessing from the context, it has to be Adam Curry.
jccalhoun 24 hours ago [-]
Over the years I heard so many people online mentioning how they liked No Agenda that I tried it 3-4 times and every single time they were talking about some racist or conspiracy theory garbage. Maybe I just happened to randomly pick the only 3-4 times they did that but that was enough for me.
abraxas 22 hours ago [-]
No, it's been consistently like that. I sampled their episodes over a number of years and the theme was the same. It was sad to see Dvorak gradually adopt the same views after a while. At first he would attempt some mild pushback but later he embraced that nonsense full steam. You truly become the average of the people you most surround yourself with.
jccalhoun 10 hours ago [-]
Sadly, that is true. I went through Dvorak's twitter feed and didn't even get to July 1st before I was exhausted by how much racist stuff he was retweeting.
ethagnawl 1 days ago [-]
Thank you. I had to scroll past way too many unqualified references to No Agenda before seeing this. That show is hot garbage and would not be out of place on (the old) InfoWars.com.
SadErn 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
corywatilo 2 days ago [-]
i have spent nearly half my life listening to the voice of John C. Dvorak on a nightly basis as i went to bed.
literally since i was in college – around 2008 – i started listening to the No Agenda Show. i'd play the podcast in one ear with the other on my pillow with a 30-minute sleep timer and play it over several nights until the next episode came out.
my outlook, my ideology, my perspective on life was partly formed by this man's words.
thanks for everything, John.
petcat 2 days ago [-]
I stopped listening to the no agenda show many years ago when I just decided that I didn't want to be worked up and angry about the world everyday of my life.
Turn off social media, turn off the news. Even local news. It's never going to make you feel good about anything. I get a weekly newsletter digest of happenings around the world and that's all I need.
My daily mood and outlook on life has increased immensely since.
morphid-rabbit 2 days ago [-]
RIP JCD.
93po 2 days ago [-]
Exactly same. I've listened to basically every episode since 2008, and 95% of the time while falling asleep, one earbud in. As recently as literally last night. Not really paying attention, just listening to their voices.
stasomatic 2 days ago [-]
Aww brother... out of many recent ones, this one is a tough one for me. I used to read his columns in Infoworld and Mac User before the blogs. He was a frequent guest on TWiT, but it looks like he and Leo had a falling out. No Agenda too, but that took a turn a while back when Adam found religion. I always relied on his (not always PC) cracks to lift my mood.
RIP my mentor that you didn't know you were, Valhalla awaits.
coleca 1 days ago [-]
RIP John C.
Been listening to No Agenda since episode 1. Cranky Geeks and Silicon Spin before that. And the occasional appearance on Computer Chronicles long ago. I always loved your passion for technology and your take on the world. You will surely be missed.
ethank 1 days ago [-]
This is sad, like a piece of my geek childhood dying. I would sometimes email him when he was writing for PC Magazine and as a 14 year old it was cool that he always emailed back, engaged in thoughtful conversation.
brynnbee 1 days ago [-]
that is really cool, I would not expect him to respond to emails like that!
delfugal 2 days ago [-]
Dvorak shaped the emerging PC industry. Larger than life figure. Sad he's not here for the AI takeover.
rmason 2 days ago [-]
In the early PC days back in the eighties the bible was PC Magazine. They had a number of really talented columnists but towering above all of them was John C. Dvorak. He wrote so well, he was at times opinionated and other times intensely funny. Whether you agreed with that weeks opinion or not you felt you were better for having read it and that is truly rare.
Then along came PC TV and he got introduced to an entirely new audience. He had a blog for awhile and then I lost track of him. Then he reentered my world when he started a SubStack, actually several. One I didn't read and that was where he pontificated on things political.
Then during COVID he touched a live wire on his political SubStack, detailed why he didn't get 'the shot' and why you should too. He also correctly called out the players and what was really going on with COVID. He discovered a third new audience and became an enemy of the administration at the same time. That people was one hell of a career. He will be missed.
throwaway27448 2 days ago [-]
> what was really going on with COVID
Let me guess: a government conspiracy to push something pro-humanity
rmason 2 days ago [-]
I didn't include the link but here is the last series part 1:
He wrote about COVID for six years. Someone should compile all those columns into a book or at least a single PDF.
throwaway27448 1 days ago [-]
Well, look I don't want to discuss such miserable topics about the man in this context; i'll look elsewhere for understanding
He was a contrarian when it came to tech; I thought he had terrible taste, little sense of what others saw in computation, and little empathy overall; but, he articulated himself well. He was a good writer and occasionally had good jokes. I'll miss him; RIP.
throwworhtthrow 2 days ago [-]
Thanks for the link. His decades of tech columns were so well-served by his skeptic curmudgeon style. There's danger in bringing that persona to all topics, I now see, shown by this regrettable chapter of his blogging life.
turtlesdown11 23 hours ago [-]
> He wrote about COVID for six years. Someone should compile all those columns into a book or at least a single PDF.
I assume, so that his age related dementia and subsequent paranoia can be studied?
rhymeswithjazz 2 days ago [-]
I clicked on this link with my 'experimental pointing device called a mouse'. Rest in peace from all the ships at sea.
asdfk-12 2 days ago [-]
Fond memories of TWiT in the early 2000s and his longstanding media deconstruction and analysis on the No Agenda show, where they eschew traditional advertising, run on open source software, build community, and rely on their listenership (Producers) for on-the-ground information and a 'value for value' funding source for the show.
scientifik 2 days ago [-]
Sad, I met him very briefly ~20 years ago when he was giving a talk at my Alma Mater (no, you've never heard of it)
Funny enough the audience was made up of his contemporaries but were completely computer-illiterate. He wanted to discuss heady topics but the Q&A was mostly people asking him to explain Linux (How can it be free? Who owns it?) I could tell he was a bit annoyed to have to get so basic with his audience but I think he kind of somewhat enjoyed sharing a new concept with them.
cebert 2 days ago [-]
I’ll always remember him from Twit. He always made the show entertaining. I wonder if he and Leo were ever able to reconcile their differences.
fraXis 2 days ago [-]
Sadly, I don't think so. I remember Leo saying some not-so-nice things about John on the pre-show to TWIT a few months ago. I never understood how Leo couldn't forgive John for whatever he did, but Leo has had long-lasting feuds with a lot of people over the years. All that wasted time fighting between those two when we could have had them doing great shows together over the past few years and giving us great content. What a waste of time fighting.
cebert 1 days ago [-]
It’s even more disheartening seeing so many conflicts between family members that remain unresolved until death.
prodigycorp 1 days ago [-]
leo, like other radio-type people, always carried a bad combo of big egos and massive chips on shoulders.
havaloc 2 days ago [-]
I loved reading his columns at PC Magazine growing up, it's an end of an era. He had such an interesting view of the PC industry as a whole and his column was almost always the first thing I read when a new issue would arrive at my house.
cebert 1 days ago [-]
I am curious did anyone else listen to the DH Unplugged Podcast with John and Andrew Horowitz? It was a lighthearted financial markets podcast. I listened to it semi-regularly, and even last week he sounded good.
archerx 23 hours ago [-]
I do, he and Andrew had a nice chemistry that somehow blended well. I wonder if Andrew will have John’s son on again.
cebert 21 hours ago [-]
His son was great when he guest-appeared when John was in the hospital. He seems to be quite successful himself.
epochbtc 2 days ago [-]
I remember reading an article by him in the 90s where he claimed e-commerce would never take off because all internet users expect everything to be free.
technics256 2 days ago [-]
hahaha that made me smile, well the era of napster and such it wasnt so far fetched i suppose
bananaflag 1 days ago [-]
I still expect information to be free. I am a bit weirded out by substack paywalls which have no obvious way to be circumvented.
Jimmc414 2 days ago [-]
Used to watch him regularly on ZDTV. RIP
mutagen 2 days ago [-]
One of my highlights of 90s internet was forwarding some amusing computer anecdote or joke somewhere where it eventually got to John Dvorak with my email at the top of the forward chain and he reached out asking if he could credit me or get help finding the source. Unfortunately I didn't know the original source but I felt connected to the world in a new way.
SeenNotHeard 2 days ago [-]
In my youth, his InfoWorld columns were appointment reading. A one-of-a-kind in the industry.
alexitosrv 2 days ago [-]
Agree, and the sad thing for me now is not being able to find an equivalent space of such crankiness against the way things are going with an authoritative voice.
dec0dedab0de 2 days ago [-]
I used to watch his podcast ~20 years ago, I still bring up how excited he was about finding secret bottles of wine in costco
bredren 2 days ago [-]
I used to read him in my dad's PC Magazine subscription. I had some ~falling out over what my teenage self perceived as backwards take on mp3s and their proliferation. Perhaps one one of my earliest experiences with "kill your heroes" concept.
Glad for all of his contributions, I did enjoy reading his work.
TheAmazingRace 21 hours ago [-]
I'm late to the party with my comment here, but it should probably be said.
Experiencing my formative years in the 90s, and having a PC buff for a dad, we periodically paged through the PC Magazine issues that we would receive by mail, and it was always a fun time. John's articles were funny in a way, and I enjoyed his curmudgeon-y writing. He was also the person I found out about IBM's ill-fated OS/2 from and looked into it in my spare time.
Later on, I discovered he was on a podcast with Adam Curry called the No Agenda Show. I wouldn't say I particularly like the podcast these days, but in the mid 2010s, it got me through some rough times and was like a fun conversation I got to listen to for hours on roadtrips I'd take in California. I even donated a few times, though never quite made it to their roundtable of knights lol.
I'll try and tune into today's show to hear the eulogy.
RIP Mr. Dvorak.
petcat 2 days ago [-]
I'll always appreciate his love for Costco wines.
kalleboo 1 days ago [-]
The real tragedy is that now we'll never get the vinegar book.
brynnbee 1 days ago [-]
on this day we are all the unwritten vinegar book
bananaflag 2 days ago [-]
Here is an old column of his, "New Architecture Needed"
I remember first coming across him on ZDTV/TechTV, then realizing he also wrote articles in some of those magazines I had bought. But mostly I just saw him as the resident tech curmudgeon.
Haha, yeah.
"Gigabit Ethernet. Even 100-Mbps Ethernet has not produced a killer app. The modern network has produced convenience and the ability to share the Internet on one connection. Some people reckon this to be a killer app. I don’t. Perhaps the networked game is the killer app here."
jarcoal 2 days ago [-]
Damn, this one hit hard. Grew up watching him on ZDTV/TechTV. RIP.
lee_a 2 days ago [-]
Goodness. First came across his work watching Silicon Spin on ZDTV while I was in high school. Such a legend.
Was this the guy that always had it out for Apple, and was somewhat notorious with bad Apple predictions?
sadsach 22 hours ago [-]
He predicted the switch to intel from PowerPC and while a blind squirrel finds and nut, etc. etc. I was always very impressed with that one
Danox 2 days ago [-]
Yes…
vinexus 1 days ago [-]
ITM JCD! Thank you for all your contributions!
Your honesty and directness will always be remembered!
RIP JCD!
jacobgold 2 days ago [-]
He was our Andy Rooney. RIP.
calmbonsai 2 days ago [-]
I don't know the man personally, but I was never impressed by his punditry even in the early PC MAG days and it got even worse when he started writing for MarketWatch.
He was always lots of loud platitudes or damnations with more noise than signal or thoughtful analysis. At some point, I just stopped listening and/or reading whenever his name came up.
cb33 2 days ago [-]
Been racking my brain trying to understand what the purpose of this comment is. I'm not saying everyone MUST write something positive about the man, but I just have a hard time understanding what this comment in particular adds.
reaperducer 2 days ago [-]
Been racking my brain trying to understand what the purpose of this comment is.
Some people just like to see themselves in phosphor, and were never taught not to speak ill of the dead. Etiquette is a lost art.
calmbonsai 2 days ago [-]
You are correct. I do not follow that moral praxis.
picofarad 20 hours ago [-]
Thank you for your courage.
antonvs 1 days ago [-]
The purpose could be to connect with others with similar opinions. Like me. Reading this thread, I’m discovering that the point about Dvorak wasn’t his typical wildly off-base opinions but, to many people apparently, the entertainment value in how he presented them. I mistook him for a bad pundit when he was really an entertainer - like treating a boy band as musicians instead of performers.
cb33 10 hours ago [-]
Ah ok, yes perhaps that's it. I didn't consider that type of "connection"...
asveikau 2 days ago [-]
I think part of what made him amusing was he was earnest in his bad takes. If you heard him on a podcast he seemed kind of lovingly wrong, like the annoying uncle that you might not like listening to but you can't say you hate.
Caveat, I haven't read or listened to anything with him in some time, so I could be wrong or out of date, but that was how his public persona came across to me years ago.
sadsach 22 hours ago [-]
I have always thought of him in this way, and I have quite a few extended family members that fit into this category. Sometimes they aggravate me to no end, but someday I will miss them dearly all the same. And as cliche as it may sound: John C. Dvorak was truly one of a kind.
calmbonsai 2 days ago [-]
Truth regarding his earnesty.
I never felt he mislead, but also at some point (much like ESPN’s Stephen Smith) he decided “winning” in punditry was more about by being loud than about by being right.
I remember listening to him in the early 90’s on WFSU public radio, a show called Software Hard Talk. I enjoyed his snarky wit. Listened to him repeatedly call one of the BOB characters barf the dog much to Melinda (French) Gates’ annoyance.
His one page gossip column in the back of PC Mag was pretty great too.
This news makes me kinda sad.
alexjplant 2 days ago [-]
My grandparents sprung for a subscription to PC Magazine when I was a preteen for a year or two so that I could read his column in the very back of each issue. I'm sure my thoughts on his opinions would be radically different today but his prose was timeless and hilarious. Mad respect and RIP.
thoughtpeddler 1 days ago [-]
RIP JCD. As a kid growing up in the 1990s, I looked forward to your (highly opinionated) column in every new issue of PC Mag. So much of my own taste in software and computing was shaped by absorbing your strong opinions. Thanks for being you.
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 2 days ago [-]
It wasn’t that long ago that we were here remembering Om Malik, including him being on Cranky Geeks. Now they’ve come for the king. RIP.
I parasocially ‘fell out’ with Dvorak as I got older because I just couldn’t get behind his oldschool crankiness. Nevertheless, RIP.
chongli 2 days ago [-]
I remember reading some of his columns growing up and I used to intensely dislike him for his dismissive takes on a lot of products and technologies I thought were important (most infamously, he dismissed the mouse)! Later on, I saw him as one of the regular guests on Leo Laporte's TWIT podcasts, and it totally changed my perception of him. The guy was genuinely hilarious and a real lovable curmudgeon, not a true naysayer.
I hadn't read or heard anything from him in recent years, though I had heard he had a falling out with Leo Laporte. He might have reconciled more recently but I am not sure. I know Leo will genuinely mourn him, as they were friends and colleagues for many years. I really miss him now too!
matwood 1 days ago [-]
Interesting reading the different comments here and how they show JCD's appeal across generations. I only read his columns in PC Magazine, and they were always entertaining. I never listened to his podcasts or read his substacks, but it sounds like many of those were just as good.
It's always a weird feeling when people you 'grow up' with pass away. For me, it's a reminder of my own mortality.
alizaki 2 days ago [-]
His PC magazine column was the first thing I read when I was able to get hold of old PC Magazines.
Even in the fast cycle of PCs in the 90s, you could learn something reading yesterdays newspaper from his columns. RIP
gumby 2 days ago [-]
Always confident, occasionally correct.
throwaway2037 11 hours ago [-]
Why does the X post say he was 74 years old, but the Wiki page says it was 80?
simooooo 2 days ago [-]
Listened to him all the time. RIP
sgerenser 2 days ago [-]
RIP. I remember he had a column in MacUser magazine in the early 90s. Probably at the same time he was writing for PC Magazine. It was the original "ragebait" since he always seemed to be pretty negative on Apple and suggested that Windows was better in many ways. I remember all the readers writing in complaining about his hot takes and at the time I didn't realize it was an intentional strategy.
The span of technological growth that JCD chronicled is hard to match. His body of work is a singular thread to the early days of personal computing all the way through commercialization of the internet and up to artificial intelligence. One career covering such an arc is pretty incredible.
vinexus 1 days ago [-]
ITM JCD! See you in the next life! Thank you for your contributions!
2 days ago [-]
vegabook 1 days ago [-]
Somewhat surprised that pcmag.com has not published an obituary. He was one of the load-bearing walls of the brand for what must’ve been two decades and certainly throughout the growth years.
samgranieri 1 days ago [-]
This is sad. I grew up with him as a columnist in like MacWorld or MacUser, to later on see him become an Apple troll. I think he broke his hand off patting himself on the back after his prediction of Apple moving to Intel chips came to fruition.
I was sad when he got fired from PC Mag over that 5g column.
badmonkey0001 2 days ago [-]
I sat next to John in our office for a year or so back in the heyday of podcasting. He was quite the character. RIP.
arm32 2 days ago [-]
May he write some excellent reviews of the technology in the afterlife. Thanks for all the great reads, John!
xbar 2 days ago [-]
He was a thoughtful and insightful writer. I eagerly awaited his PC Magazine article every single week.
ntoskrnl_exe 1 days ago [-]
RIP, every once in a while I rewatch the segment in Computer Chronicles where he attempted to take apart an IBM PS/2, one of the funniest things ever.
shmoe 1 days ago [-]
He didn't get any spam.. the early, great days of TWiT! RIP.
chvid 1 days ago [-]
Sorry to hear this - he was smart and really entertaining.
kolanos 2 days ago [-]
About a decade ago I heard John complaining on No Agenda about a sound card mixer problem he was having in Linux. I had the same model card so I emailed offering some debugging advice. He responded almost immediately and we went back and forth trying things. If memory serves it was a config issue with pulseaudio. It was the highlight of my week.
pizlonator 1 days ago [-]
I remember reading his column in PC Magazine in he 90s
He was all about OS/2
Good times
adamrezich 2 days ago [-]
I grew up reading his column in PC Mag, then watched him on TechTV, and then listened to him on TWiT (where he was consistently the best part of the show, and how I learned about Sarbanes-Oxley, because he'd bring it up like every single episode for a good long while there), and later No Agenda. Before I'd realized it, John had be come the constant throughline as technology progressed throughout my life. I knew it was going to happen sooner or later, but it still really hurts to see him go.
geenat 1 days ago [-]
Always really enjoyed him on TechTV and This Week In Tech. Good chemistry with Leo Laporte- made for some very fun shows.
hjkl0 1 days ago [-]
I used to listen to a lot of twit shows back in the day. “Netcasts you love”. Are they still around/any good?
That’s very sad. I enjoyed his contributions to PC Mag and TWiT.
p1necone 1 days ago [-]
TIL the Dvorak layout does not derive its name the same way as the qwerty layout - I guess I never looked at a Dvorak keyboard before.
saturn8601 2 days ago [-]
The Silicon Spin intro and Cranky Geeks theme song are burned into my head.
I was in elementary school watching ZDTV after school instead of doing my homework. One of those shows that's burned into my head, I don't even know why, is Silicon Spin.
Every now and then I have visions of my childhood, dreaming about this mysterious place called Silicon Valley that I never actually managed to get to. I also recall the fond moments watching literally everything on TechTV and ZDTV even if I didn't really fully understand everything. (I mean you're not going to understand everything in elementary school).
John C. Dvorak was probably speaking of content that my age range didn't fully comprehend at the time, but I still loved it.
I was so fortunate to meet Patrick Norton back at DEFCON in 2019, and it was a dream come true. I was able to express my appreciation not only of him but also about the whole ZDTV and TechTV cast including John C. Dvorak, many of whom had gone in different directions post TechTV. They were all such a comforting part of my childhood.
I was watching TechTV on 9/11 and remember how when Bush got on tv in the evening, they had a momentary fumble in switching over to him so they just overlaid CNN or some other news channel. Growing up Muslim in that area of the country, all the TechTV shows including Silicon Spin became even more pivotal in keeping some semblance of the happiness and ease of life I had before that day (which I never really got back).
Watching these old episodes are charming given the topics:
This has been a tough few years seeing people and companies that provided me a lot of joy and happiness start to pass away. I guess its just a part of realizing you are getting old and time moves on to the next generation.
I speak to a lot of Gen-Z since they are defining the culture now and so many of them just have little to no concept of the world before iPhone and as such don't remember that era of computing and the people involved in it.
I feel that makes all the people that were around even more special to me. We all got to be a part of that slice of history (them producing and me appreciating it and growing because of it) and it was unique to us in that time period. I am thankful that he was a part of my life journey in a small way.
ChicagoDave 1 days ago [-]
I discovered Visual Basic 1.0 from his back page Info World column. Still have the manuals and floppy disks.
ranger_danger 2 days ago [-]
Wasn't he the one who famously said the iBook looked like a toilet seat?
dredmorbius 2 days ago [-]
Was he wrong?
(Often yes, in this instance ... I'll give it to him.)
I was very lucky to get a chance to interview him on our podcast back in 2010 [1]. He of course was very funny and insightful.
So kind of him to even come on our unknown show.
I used to love listening to him in early No Agenda [2] talking about his takes on all sorts of worldly things especially fine dining, spices, and all the famous people he'd had run-ins with.
Man, I feel like we're losing a lot of the people I grew up watching this year. What a bummer.
uproarchat 2 days ago [-]
Rest in peace! I definitely have some strong memories watching JCD over the years. You will be missed.
overgard 2 days ago [-]
Sad news, I grew up reading his column.
etempleton 2 days ago [-]
He wrote a hell of a column. Opinions were notoriously often wrong, but always entertaining to read.
qwertyuiop_ 2 days ago [-]
RIP ITM
soupbowl 2 days ago [-]
Wow! What a shock and a bummer, I've been a fan for a long time.
avadodin 1 days ago [-]
Accidentally OCRd this as John D. Carmack
8thcross 1 days ago [-]
I woke up to this terrible news, and I’m shocked and surprised. I was listening to him just yesterday!
John, I’ve gained a lot from your talks, insights, tips on wine and food, your perspectives on technology, and your advice. Thank you, sir, wherever you are. I wish your family peace, and my deepest condolences.
Memory tags: His one page articles from back of pcmag and byte mags, his podcasts with leo, cranky geeks show, noagenda, horiwitz, heart attack, berkeley, wine, when I was a kid, california zephyr, mudflaps, tip of the day. you never finished that book!
marcuschong 2 days ago [-]
I really enjoyed reading John C. Dvorak's PC Magazine column when I was just getting started in tech. His contrarian style was a nice change from most tech columnists at the time. He had a grumpy but oddly likable personality, and I even enjoyed No Agenda for a while and his occasional TWiT appearances.
That's why I have such mixed feelings about him. Somewhere along the way, being a contrarian seemed to become an end in itself. He became a Trump fan, and the No Agenda agenda increasingly drifted toward questioning well-established facts, from climate science to questioning the parents of the Sandy Hook victims. Real Alex Jones shit.
cdubendo 14 hours ago [-]
ITM
jnaina 2 days ago [-]
used to look forward to his articles in Inforworld and PCmag, and his controversial takes therein.
Rest in peace.
wnevets 2 days ago [-]
Rough year for the cranky geeks cast.
thundercleeze 2 days ago [-]
What a bummer.
QuantumAtom 2 days ago [-]
May his memory be a blessing.
macinjosh 1 days ago [-]
This one hurts. We will miss you Mr. Dvorak! RIP
111111000 19 hours ago [-]
Satirical Dvorak layout. Old joke: one fish said to the other, how is the water? It
replied, what is water?
christkv 2 days ago [-]
Going to miss him he was always a fun curmudgeon with an interesting point of view. My condolences to his family.
I hated that guy so much when I was a fan of Apple. I think maybe he did it on purpose to keep the readership up. I should probably go back and read a few of his rants again with 20/20 hindsight, now that I'm not particularly fond of Apple any longer. I might end up laughing or even agreeing with him.
ratelimitsteve 2 days ago [-]
Still an opportunity to edit his wiki if anyone wants to be the official Bear of Bad News(tm)
marknutter 2 days ago [-]
I loved listening to him on TWiT and other shows/podcasts. RIP, what a legend.
davidwritesbugs 2 days ago [-]
He was the house curmudgeon - hilarious
ChrisMarshallNY 2 days ago [-]
I'd say this def rates a black bar.
jerhewet 2 days ago [-]
I could not agree more. You might love him, you might hate him. But he was a fixture in the Golden Age of Personal Computing.
ChrisMarshallNY 2 days ago [-]
He was definitely controversial, as evidenced by the rating on the grandfather post.
maratc 1 days ago [-]
Not sure if it's about him being controversial, or about him commenting on the industry but not being a part of it in a sense that e.g. Dennis Ritchie or Steve Jobs were. (Could be both.)
VaucGiaps 1 days ago [-]
@dang ?
atlanta90210 1 days ago [-]
Started reading John’s columns in InfoWorld in the 80’s when my parents scraped together the money for a subscription.
After that I never stopped reading his work, watching his shows, and listening to him (up till last Sunday’s excellent show).
Thank God for John C. Dvorak What a loss.
tboyd47 1 days ago [-]
.
ksurace 2 days ago [-]
Incredible loss.
Markoff 1 days ago [-]
For those who wonder - cause of death: "My source says he succumbed to complications following his double-bypass surgery." –Scott Mace (2nd link)
Google:
The overall risk of death during or within 30 days of double coronary artery bypass surgery (CABG) is very low, generally ranging between 1% and 2%. This translates to a short-term survival rate of 98% to 99%.
For a 74-year-old patient undergoing an isolated double bypass surgery (CABG), the short-term risk of death within 30 days of the procedure generally ranges from 2.5% to 4%. This translates to a short-term survival rate of roughly 96% to 97.5%.
So seems like pretty bad luck on his side.
I remember him back from 90's from reading PC Mag, didn't left that big of an impression on me besides the familiar thumbnail photo and Czech sounding name.
ngcazz 1 days ago [-]
RIP. I don't remember him being right often, but I did love some of his opinion pieces all the same, like when he shouted out MorphOS as the best desktop OS out there.
archerx 1 days ago [-]
This was a very sad thing to wake up too. He sounded alright in the last episode of No Agenda. I wish him, his family and friends the best. I will miss John’s unique brand of charm and insights. I really looked forward to the biweekly episodes + DH unplugged.
Rest in Peace John, I will shed some tears for you today.
oliyoung 2 days ago [-]
First Om, now Dvorak.
Such a loss, the prototypical cranky geek. Loved his takes with Curry and Leporte
burnt-resistor 1 days ago [-]
I remember him from print edition PC Magazine articles in the 80's and 90's.
browningstreet 2 days ago [-]
RIP
2 days ago [-]
paulpauper 2 days ago [-]
Last tweet by him just 2 days ago.
james_pm 2 days ago [-]
Sad news. He was the OG tech grouch. Went way off the deep end with conspiracy crap and right wing nonsense over the last decade, but I always assumed some of that was opportunistic performance. RIP.
shmoe 2 days ago [-]
Was a fairly big fan of his takes until then. RIP. He'll always have a place in computing history.
1 days ago [-]
krunger 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
kerrieshitz 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
mlindner 2 days ago [-]
Literally never even heard of him or this show he apparently ran so I'm confused why this is so upvoted.
bigfishrunning 1 days ago [-]
I'd be willing to be that there are lots of people that are important to other people, and you've never heard of them. We don't have to pass *all* media through you, although we do try to get your approval on most things.
themadturk 2 days ago [-]
Ah, well, you missed an important (and obviously beloved) part of microcomputer culture. I haven't thought about him for years, but read his columns in PC Magazine religiously. I didn't always like him, but I always read him.
shmoe 2 days ago [-]
A very important part of computing media history... and a mixed bag.
> He is a nephew of sociologist August Dvorak, creator of the Dvorak keyboard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Dvorak
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_keyboard_layout
Ok, I'm going to shame myself in public for this but, I always thought they were "DVORAK keyboards" and they were called this way just like the "AZERTY keyboards", that is, the first 6 letters of the first row were "DVORAK".
Character escape, in this context, of course, refers to the keys themselves flying out of the keyboard, this being a hardware product and all.
...Yeah I don't work in SQL if it wasn't obvious lol
No Agenda, John and Adam will forever have a special place in my heart regardless of the show eventually putting me off. Adam was what first brought my attention to Second Life where I ended up randomly meeting my now wife. We ended up listening to early No Agenda during long car rides. During one of the episodes John and Adam talked about their visit to Chez Spencer near our home in SF. We checked it out and loved it and later had our wedding rehearsal dinner there. Thank you, John!
It simply flagged that he was on the “wrong team”.
If you take the political views angle, up to 2005 or so, I was very much for small State and liberal economics, but, over the years, I observed the results of assistance programs for vulnerable populations, industrial policies that developed entire regions, and other measures that ensured more opportunities for upwards social mobility, especially for populations that were often excluded from that. Then, in 2015, a coup came, that ousted a left-wing president and demolished most of those policies. Then a far-right president finished demolishing what was left.
At this point, I am very left-leaning because of this. I have seen what injustices do, and how we can eliminate them - and it's not even hard to do so. If even a relatively poor country such as Brazil can do that, anyone can.
That is highly dependent on what you're wrong about, and if you change your beliefs based on evidence, and how many people you try to influence to believe your wrong beliefs.
I know there's people like Sir David Attenborough who have three alphabets worth of letters after their name, but I hadn't considered the idea of gaming the system to get superfluous titles.
I grew up watching his show on Tech TV and reading his columns in PC Magazine.
He used to butt heads with Leo Laporte and it was great:
https://youtu.be/C96YG7qzN80?t=142
But they used to be awesome. FLOSS weekly, Security Now, MacBreak Weekly, etc.
But a few years ago, I found out there were some scandals at TwiT, etc, but the network still seems to be going on though.
RIP BuzzKill.
I see different people saying different things about Leo and John. What happened?
At the same time they both became increasingly politically polarized. John C Davorak became a full right wing conspiracy theorist. Leo increasingly embraced the left wing ideology of the moment.
I think John turned out to be right in the end. They did seem to patch things up with John appearing on a episode years later I think "a christmas miracle" was the title, but that was the last time he was on as far as I know.
I haven't followed him much since, and seeing his recent pictures made me realize how much time has passed since those days.
Rest in peace, sir.
Dvorak's show was called Silicon Spin. John had a panel of guests, sort of like the original Meet the Press with Lawrence E. Spivak.
I also listened to a weekly public radio show named Real Computing. John would interview entrepreneurs about their new tech products. I think about 3 interviews per show. The station which carried Real Computing in Albuquerque was KANW, 89.1 FM.
I never heard of No Agenda until this Hacker News piece, and it seems to me Silicon Spin and Real Computing were probably much more worth my time, so I didn't miss much in my ignorance of No Agenda.
I miss the older shows, and I would have appreciated more similar appearances by John since, but those days are gone. RIP.
I am not sure John would have done the same.
I liked them both too. And I listened to No Agenda for a while, and my opinion is based on years of hearing and reading them both.
https://imgur.com/a/8SVQGnj
https://ibb.co/x8RJvWyX
"I'm told there is a relationship, but I can't prove it."
John knows who his uncles are. His father is Walter Charles Dvorak born in Minneapolis to John Steve Dvorak (also born in Minneapolis). August Dvorak and all of his siblings (none of them Walter) were all born in McLeod County to IMMIGRANT Joseph Dvorak. If there's a connection it goes back to Bohemia.
How are you supposed to remember it then?
Or is there also a keyboard inventor named Querty?
[1]https://archive.org/details/PC-Mag-1999-12-14/page/88/mode/2...
Thank you for your service.
People like you were how people in other countries learned about technology and of other cultures in the days before the internet.
Some person (people?) would post scripts from Red Dwarf on one of the networks years before the show became available televisually in the United States. I used to devour those and laughed and laughed and laughed. That kind of British humor comes through well as text.
One of the funniest things he used to do was write draft reviews of software simply by looking at the back of the box. He said you could get it like 90% right just doing that, I was a different era.
I also remember Leo Laporte constantly trying to take his phone back of him as John was trying to guess his passcode or unlock pattern based on the screen smudges.
Didn't agree with him at lot but he always brought something to the table.
He was a hilarious curmudgeon. He will be missed.
He was a great part of TWIT. I liked his obscure software references (lotus Jazz was one I think).
He also found this new thing is like that old thing.
His non positive takes were a great addition to the show.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/windows-weekly-audio/i...
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcvPifFSUL0&t=32m29s
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcvPifFSUL0&t=47m12s
https://us1.campaign-archive.com/?u=d0e55f319709994434570865...
His concern was not the theory and practice of "net-neutrality".
It was that "net-neutrality" was being used by various industry lobbyists and politicians at that time to justify the creation of a definition of "lawful traffic". By their definition, only "lawful traffic" would be subject to neutrality. Traffic that was not deemed "lawful traffic" would not be treated the same and could be shaped and blocked.
It was at the time that Pirate Bay was under constant legal attack (2015) and BitTorrent was the "unlawful traffic".
IMO this was a good take that not many journalists paid attention to.
I can't think of many things he has said that I would agree with. On top of that he's usually angry and spiteful in pretty much everything he says. Why would I not be in constant opposition to that?
Are you really under the impression that's the truth?
There's no TDS (whatever version of it you like). Trump himself is the disease.
But yes, right-wing people still defending him, because he may still speak something they like about some issues, is like an abused partner telling the doctors in ER: "but he is a good husband"
I actually remember that.
He pulled one apart and couldnt put it back together for the rest of the episode :-)
>He was a hilarious curmudgeon.
Agreed.
So exactly like everyone today, but also interesting?
Well that is definitely something different about today's software websites. How many times have you looked at a company's website for a product/service and still left wondering what it did?
Often quite literally, in his PC Magazine columns!
OTOH, I think that the Sound Blaster and the VGA card are the biggest factors in the Amiga's demise. From a user's standpoint (a user who doesn't care about planar graphics, a blitter, and so on), the PC had better graphics and sound, for less, and with all their software still available. Being a peripheral, the graphics on the PC were much easier to change and evolve, and quickly surpassed the Amigas, that had to preserve compatibility with what was, at that point, hardware getting less competitive.
I think John is a product of his generation and environment. Adam too. I don't think they're bad people, but very misguided in some ways. Despite that I am very sad to see John has passed. I really admired his dedication to the show and schedule for so long. He was a true professional in his craft.
I owe a lot to Adam and John in terms of entertainment, comfort, and contributions to my worldview from a young age.
In 1984, while arguing that Apple’s new Macintosh might fail, Dvorak wrote:
“The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse.’ There is no evidence that people want to use these things.”
It's a shame John didn't live to see his prediction come true - I think we're very nearly there as AI starts to do most of our interfacing with computers instead of mouse and keyboard.
RIP.
10 months ago, I actually posted on HN about how much John (and his peers) cared and helped: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45076557.
Trivia: I took both the pics of him on his wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum
Yes, he could be harsh online, but he also had a sense of humor about the persona he had created for himself online. And it was a persona. That doesn’t mean he was tolerant of stupidity, or what he saw as stupidity, in real life, but face to face there was a passion and a sense of humor that got filtered away by having lots of infrastructure between you and him.
We disagreed on many things. Some of them, in retrospect, he was right about. And we had many heated discussions (mostly entirely in private - neither of us needed an audience to turn the heat up in a discussion). I remember him fondly, I miss talking to him and I was very sad when he passed. I still think about him.
His technical content was almost always high-quality, but one would often need to first don one's Nomex suit to get to said content.
Dvorak was quite good, but for me much too oriented towards the Wintel world.
And then there was another guy who was sooo consistently bad I referred to him as Less Than Thorough. I'm not sure now whether he was also the MIT economist who died in 2016.
Robert X. Cringely (Mark Stephens, not those later writing at IDG under that name) was by far the best of the bunch, though was somewhat late starting writing columns only in 1987. He knew his stuff, correctly predicted trends etc. And continues to today at cringely.com, so that's a 40 year tech pundit career so far.
Almost certainly Lester Carl Thurow (May 7, 1938 – March 25, 2016).
I've read that sobriquet a few times myself. I suspect his economic ideas were more premature than wrong.
> I suspect his economic ideas were more premature than wrong.
I don't think economics is a time-dependent field.
Apparently he favoured more government involvement in industry, which I believe has rarely if ever worked out well anywhere. Government officials are very very bad at predicting what will actually work or sell well, are too risk-averse to back the true winners preferring CYA to prove that failure wasn't predictable or their fault, no real skin in the game so easily swayed by dinners and sports tickets and personal favours, and almost always double down on failed ideas and companies rather than admitting they got it wrong.
Provide a safety net for individuals, by all means, but not for companies.
See the American School of Economics (19th century), China from Deng onward, industrial policy in Japan (Meiji Restoration, post-WWII), Germany (pre- and post-WWII), Israel, South Korea (post-WWII, particularly 1970 onward), the US (particularly FDR/WWII, also Cold War and much since), just off the top of my head. Whilst it's quite true that government involvement can go bad, it can also go quite well, and as with many matters, the distinction generally isn't between regulation and no regulation, but effective vs. ineffective regulation.
If you read Adam Smith, you'll find that much of what he inveighs against is actually economic power compounding upon itself to interfere with what would otherwise be more productive economic organisation and activity. Protectionism and monopolisation (Smith's term was engrossment) have been harmful for many centuries. A more recent but fascinating account was compiled by Bernhard J. Stern in 1937, published as "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations": <https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag...>. Markdown (my own effort): <https://rentry.co/szi3g>.
Corporations are also very bad at predicting what will actually work or sell well, are risk averse, practice CYA, and ... seek to sway those susceptible to dinners, sports tickets, and personal favours, etc., etc., etc.
There may even be a role for safety nets for companies, as operational concerns, but in which investors remain at risk. That is, yes, if your country is fundamentally reliant on, say, a well-functioning electrical (or other) infrastructure, banking / finance sector, pharmaceutical industry, manufacturing network (especially networks of smaller parts suppliers and service providers), then act to stabilise these when exogenous factors other than superior competition threaten them, but don't bail out the investors. Money can be sourced from elsewhere, but capital equipment, institutional knowledge, and market relationships can be easily destroyed and take many years or decades to restore, if at all.
I remember thinking in the early 1980s, when I struggled to get my first dot matrix printer to work with an old instrumentation computer that in the future printers will just work. And then the future came and printers became orders of magnitude more frustrating to use — let alone own.
And I remember the early days of the internet and later the web. How much more fun it was. Now the Internet is this annoying, enshittified sewer that I have to tolerate in my life. If I could I would have preferred for it to not play any part in my life anymore. I can understand that most people who were born later than me can’t imagine life without the Internet. This is people’s lives now. But I can still remember what it was like to be entirely free. To have more real relationships with people you liked.
I used to think people who got rich and left the tech world to pursue more “offline” interests were perhaps a bit nutty. Now I understand where they come from. The ultimate privilege today is to not have to care, to not take part, to just drop off the face of the world/internet.
I need only open my email to be reminded of how little I want to be online.
It looks like Adam Curry and John’s wife Mimi will be hosting an episode of No Agenda tomorrow to share stories and anecdotes in remembrance.
https://mailchi.mp/nashownotes/rip-jcd-no-agenda-newsletter?...
The post link above says he was 74, THe wikipedia page says 80. I gues one will be corrected. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Dvorak
RIP
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_C._Dvorak&ol...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Dvorak
Enough scrolling through the edit history and you could determine when wikipedia finally got their shit together on his birthdate.
Do you happen to know where?
He went all-in on his takes. Most were on the money, some were big misses. He was very good at what he did. R.I.P.
https://www.pcmag.com/opinions/reddits-wild-west-experiment-...
https://www.pcmag.com/opinions/the-30-year-ai-scare-cycle
https://www.pcmag.com/opinions/the-dark-ages-of-search
https://www.pcmag.com/opinions/enough-with-the-3d-printer-hy...
Their podcast is one of the last bastion of independence: no ads, all funded, produced, developed, self hosted by a group of volunteers.
I miss cranky geeks, to the point where I've gone back to listen to older episodes.
Read my cranky posts about what an abomination Unicode has become!
But it’s ok. We’ll meet again at the great Apple Store in Heaven.
In heaven, macOS is GNU-licensed. GPL3+, nothing less.
literally since i was in college – around 2008 – i started listening to the No Agenda Show. i'd play the podcast in one ear with the other on my pillow with a 30-minute sleep timer and play it over several nights until the next episode came out.
my outlook, my ideology, my perspective on life was partly formed by this man's words.
thanks for everything, John.
Turn off social media, turn off the news. Even local news. It's never going to make you feel good about anything. I get a weekly newsletter digest of happenings around the world and that's all I need.
My daily mood and outlook on life has increased immensely since.
RIP my mentor that you didn't know you were, Valhalla awaits.
Been listening to No Agenda since episode 1. Cranky Geeks and Silicon Spin before that. And the occasional appearance on Computer Chronicles long ago. I always loved your passion for technology and your take on the world. You will surely be missed.
Then along came PC TV and he got introduced to an entirely new audience. He had a blog for awhile and then I lost track of him. Then he reentered my world when he started a SubStack, actually several. One I didn't read and that was where he pontificated on things political.
Then during COVID he touched a live wire on his political SubStack, detailed why he didn't get 'the shot' and why you should too. He also correctly called out the players and what was really going on with COVID. He discovered a third new audience and became an enemy of the administration at the same time. That people was one hell of a career. He will be missed.
Let me guess: a government conspiracy to push something pro-humanity
https://dvorak.substack.com/p/the-covid-decision-tree-part-o...
He wrote about COVID for six years. Someone should compile all those columns into a book or at least a single PDF.
He was a contrarian when it came to tech; I thought he had terrible taste, little sense of what others saw in computation, and little empathy overall; but, he articulated himself well. He was a good writer and occasionally had good jokes. I'll miss him; RIP.
I assume, so that his age related dementia and subsequent paranoia can be studied?
Funny enough the audience was made up of his contemporaries but were completely computer-illiterate. He wanted to discuss heady topics but the Q&A was mostly people asking him to explain Linux (How can it be free? Who owns it?) I could tell he was a bit annoyed to have to get so basic with his audience but I think he kind of somewhat enjoyed sharing a new concept with them.
Glad for all of his contributions, I did enjoy reading his work.
Experiencing my formative years in the 90s, and having a PC buff for a dad, we periodically paged through the PC Magazine issues that we would receive by mail, and it was always a fun time. John's articles were funny in a way, and I enjoyed his curmudgeon-y writing. He was also the person I found out about IBM's ill-fated OS/2 from and looked into it in my spare time.
Later on, I discovered he was on a podcast with Adam Curry called the No Agenda Show. I wouldn't say I particularly like the podcast these days, but in the mid 2010s, it got me through some rough times and was like a fun conversation I got to listen to for hours on roadtrips I'd take in California. I even donated a few times, though never quite made it to their roundtable of knights lol.
I'll try and tune into today's show to hear the eulogy.
RIP Mr. Dvorak.
https://www.pcmag.com/archive/new-architecture-needed-32570
Haha, yeah.
ITM, RIP
Your honesty and directness will always be remembered!
RIP JCD!
He was always lots of loud platitudes or damnations with more noise than signal or thoughtful analysis. At some point, I just stopped listening and/or reading whenever his name came up.
Some people just like to see themselves in phosphor, and were never taught not to speak ill of the dead. Etiquette is a lost art.
Caveat, I haven't read or listened to anything with him in some time, so I could be wrong or out of date, but that was how his public persona came across to me years ago.
I never felt he mislead, but also at some point (much like ESPN’s Stephen Smith) he decided “winning” in punditry was more about by being loud than about by being right.
Earlier in this video he gives his opinion on the IBM PS/2: https://youtu.be/yoAH1aHmwR0?t=655
His one page gossip column in the back of PC Mag was pretty great too.
This news makes me kinda sad.
I parasocially ‘fell out’ with Dvorak as I got older because I just couldn’t get behind his oldschool crankiness. Nevertheless, RIP.
I hadn't read or heard anything from him in recent years, though I had heard he had a falling out with Leo Laporte. He might have reconciled more recently but I am not sure. I know Leo will genuinely mourn him, as they were friends and colleagues for many years. I really miss him now too!
It's always a weird feeling when people you 'grow up' with pass away. For me, it's a reminder of my own mortality.
Even in the fast cycle of PCs in the 90s, you could learn something reading yesterdays newspaper from his columns. RIP
https://vintageapple.org/macuser/
Example Feb 1989, “The NeXT Grand Scheme”
I was sad when he got fired from PC Mag over that 5g column.
He was all about OS/2
Good times
Unrelated, but Buzz Out Loud too.
I was in elementary school watching ZDTV after school instead of doing my homework. One of those shows that's burned into my head, I don't even know why, is Silicon Spin.
Every now and then I have visions of my childhood, dreaming about this mysterious place called Silicon Valley that I never actually managed to get to. I also recall the fond moments watching literally everything on TechTV and ZDTV even if I didn't really fully understand everything. (I mean you're not going to understand everything in elementary school).
John C. Dvorak was probably speaking of content that my age range didn't fully comprehend at the time, but I still loved it.
I was so fortunate to meet Patrick Norton back at DEFCON in 2019, and it was a dream come true. I was able to express my appreciation not only of him but also about the whole ZDTV and TechTV cast including John C. Dvorak, many of whom had gone in different directions post TechTV. They were all such a comforting part of my childhood.
I was watching TechTV on 9/11 and remember how when Bush got on tv in the evening, they had a momentary fumble in switching over to him so they just overlaid CNN or some other news channel. Growing up Muslim in that area of the country, all the TechTV shows including Silicon Spin became even more pivotal in keeping some semblance of the happiness and ease of life I had before that day (which I never really got back).
Watching these old episodes are charming given the topics:
[0]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYW3nkMl9GQ
[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcJBXgmdX44
This has been a tough few years seeing people and companies that provided me a lot of joy and happiness start to pass away. I guess its just a part of realizing you are getting old and time moves on to the next generation.
I speak to a lot of Gen-Z since they are defining the culture now and so many of them just have little to no concept of the world before iPhone and as such don't remember that era of computing and the people involved in it.
I feel that makes all the people that were around even more special to me. We all got to be a part of that slice of history (them producing and me appreciating it and growing because of it) and it was unique to us in that time period. I am thankful that he was a part of my life journey in a small way.
(Often yes, in this instance ... I'll give it to him.)
Memorialised on HN no less: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28437158>
I was very lucky to get a chance to interview him on our podcast back in 2010 [1]. He of course was very funny and insightful.
So kind of him to even come on our unknown show.
I used to love listening to him in early No Agenda [2] talking about his takes on all sorts of worldly things especially fine dining, spices, and all the famous people he'd had run-ins with.
[1] https://techzinglive.com/episode/6bc8086b/50-tz-interview-th...
[2] https://www.noagendashow.net/
John, I’ve gained a lot from your talks, insights, tips on wine and food, your perspectives on technology, and your advice. Thank you, sir, wherever you are. I wish your family peace, and my deepest condolences.
Memory tags: His one page articles from back of pcmag and byte mags, his podcasts with leo, cranky geeks show, noagenda, horiwitz, heart attack, berkeley, wine, when I was a kid, california zephyr, mudflaps, tip of the day. you never finished that book!
That's why I have such mixed feelings about him. Somewhere along the way, being a contrarian seemed to become an end in itself. He became a Trump fan, and the No Agenda agenda increasingly drifted toward questioning well-established facts, from climate science to questioning the parents of the Sandy Hook victims. Real Alex Jones shit.
Rest in peace.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=343NxxEiFfM
After that I never stopped reading his work, watching his shows, and listening to him (up till last Sunday’s excellent show).
Thank God for John C. Dvorak What a loss.
Google: The overall risk of death during or within 30 days of double coronary artery bypass surgery (CABG) is very low, generally ranging between 1% and 2%. This translates to a short-term survival rate of 98% to 99%.
For a 74-year-old patient undergoing an isolated double bypass surgery (CABG), the short-term risk of death within 30 days of the procedure generally ranges from 2.5% to 4%. This translates to a short-term survival rate of roughly 96% to 97.5%.
So seems like pretty bad luck on his side.
I remember him back from 90's from reading PC Mag, didn't left that big of an impression on me besides the familiar thumbnail photo and Czech sounding name.
Rest in Peace John, I will shed some tears for you today.
Such a loss, the prototypical cranky geek. Loved his takes with Curry and Leporte