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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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'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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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!
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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”.
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 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.
[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://us1.campaign-archive.com/?u=d0e55f319709994434570865...
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!
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 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
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.
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...
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.
RIP my mentor that you didn't know you were, Valhalla awaits.
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.
Their podcast is one of the last bastion of independence: no ads, all funded, produced, developed, self hosted by a group of volunteers.
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.
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.
I was sad when he got fired from PC Mag over that 5g column.
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.
https://www.pcmag.com/archive/new-architecture-needed-32570
His one page gossip column in the back of PC Mag was pretty great too.
This news makes me kinda sad.
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!
ITM, RIP
I parasocially ‘fell out’ with Dvorak as I got older because I just couldn’t get behind his oldschool crankiness. Nevertheless, RIP.
Even in the fast cycle of PCs in the 90s, you could learn something reading yesterdays newspaper from his columns. RIP
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/
Rest in peace.
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.
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.
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.
(Often yes, in this instance ... I'll give it to him.)
Memorialised on HN no less: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28437158>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=343NxxEiFfM
Such a loss, the prototypical cranky geek. Loved his takes with Curry and Leporte