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".
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:
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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"
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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 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
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://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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Earlier in this video he gives his opinion on the IBM PS/2: https://youtu.be/yoAH1aHmwR0?t=655
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.
Your honesty and directness will always be remembered!
RIP JCD!
Haha, yeah.
Glad for all of his contributions, I did enjoy reading his work.
https://www.pcmag.com/archive/new-architecture-needed-32570
It's always a weird feeling when people you 'grow up' with pass away. For me, it's a reminder of my own mortality.
ITM, RIP
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!
Even in the fast cycle of PCs in the 90s, you could learn something reading yesterdays newspaper from his columns. RIP
I was sad when he got fired from PC Mag over that 5g column.
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.
Unrelated, but Buzz Out Loud too.
He was all about OS/2
Good times
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!
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/
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.
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=343NxxEiFfM
Such a loss, the prototypical cranky geek. Loved his takes with Curry and Leporte