> He is a nephew of sociologist August Dvorak, creator of the Dvorak keyboard.
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 grew up watching his show on Tech TV and reading his columns in PC Magazine.
He used to butt heads with Leo Laporte and it was great:
I 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.
>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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?...
RIP my mentor that you didn't know you were, Valhalla awaits.
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 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...
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!
Their podcast is one of the last bastion of independence: no ads, all funded, produced, developed, self hosted by a group of volunteers.
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.
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.
Glad for all of his contributions, I did enjoy reading his work.
I parasocially ‘fell out’ with Dvorak as I got older because I just couldn’t get behind his oldschool crankiness. Nevertheless, RIP.
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!
Even in the fast cycle of PCs in the 90s, you could learn something reading yesterdays newspaper from his columns. RIP
Rest in peace.
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...
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 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>
Such a loss, the prototypical cranky geek. Loved his takes with Curry and Leporte
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.