John C. Dvorak has died
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> He is a nephew of sociologist August Dvorak, creator of the Dvorak keyboard.
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.
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 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.
I haven't followed him much since, and seeing his recent pictures made me realize how much time has passed since those days.
Rest in peace, sir.
Dvorak's show was called Silicon Spin. John had a panel of guests, sort of like the original Meet the Press with Lawrence E. Spivak.
I also listened to a weekly public radio show named Real Computing. John would interview entrepreneurs about their new tech products. I think about 3 interviews per show. The station which carried Real Computing in Albuquerque was KANW, 89.1 FM.
I never heard of No Agenda until this Hacker News piece, and it seems to me Silicon Spin and Real Computing were probably much more worth my time, so I didn't miss much in my ignorance of No Agenda.
I miss the older shows, and I would have appreciated more similar appearances by John since, but those days are gone. RIP.
I 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'm told there is a relationship, but I can't prove it."
John knows who his uncles are. His father is Walter Charles Dvorak born in Minneapolis to John Steve Dvorak (also born in Minneapolis). August Dvorak and all of his siblings (none of them Walter) were all born in McLeod County to IMMIGRANT Joseph Dvorak. If there's a connection it goes back to Bohemia.
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".
',.pyf
Character escape, in this context, of course, refers to the keys themselves flying out of the keyboard, this being a hardware product and all.
...Yeah I don't work in SQL if it wasn't obvious lol
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 hilarious curmudgeon.
Agreed.
So exactly like everyone today, but also interesting?
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.
I actually remember that.
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.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/windows-weekly-audio/i...
He pulled one apart and couldnt put it back together for the rest of the episode :-)
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.
Other vendors saw through this and instead established an industry consortium to define royalty-free standards for ISA and its successors, which surpassed MCA in technical capability soon enough.
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?
I think John is a product of his generation and environment. Adam too. I don't think they're bad people, but very misguided in some ways. Despite that I am very sad to see John has passed. I really admired his dedication to the show and schedule for so long. He was a true professional in his craft.
I owe a lot to Adam and John in terms of entertainment, comfort, and contributions to my worldview from a young age.
In 1984, while arguing that Apple’s new Macintosh might fail, Dvorak wrote:
“The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse.’ There is no evidence that people want to use these things.”
It's a shame John didn't live to see his prediction come true - I think we're very nearly there as AI starts to do most of our interfacing with computers instead of mouse and keyboard.
RIP.
10 months ago, I actually posted on HN about how much John (and his peers) cared and helped: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45076557.
Trivia: I took both the pics of him on his wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum
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.
Seeing his dual personalities was the first time I experienced this. It didn't bode well, that's for sure.
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.
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.
The examples of government intervention that you've cited mostly represent situations in which countries that already had more centralized government and broader economic intervention sought to purposefully imitate the industrial development that had emerged mostly organically in England due to its comparative lack of economic interventionism. And those efforts largely consisted of rolling back top-down interventions that had locked economies into increasingly obsolete patterns, and instead purposefully creating conditions for markets to develop.
Smith worrying about concentration of economic power is valid, but ultimately, there's no fundamental difference between governments and commercial corporations in this regard. They're both centralizing institutions operating on essentially equivalent incentive structures, managed by people with the same assumptions and conceits. Centralization itself is the problem, and polarizing around which type of organization we should favor universalizing it's failure modalities across the whole of society is more than a little silly.
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.
But it’s ok. We’ll meet again at the great Apple Store in Heaven.
In heaven, macOS is GNU-licensed. GPL3+, nothing less.
Read my cranky posts about what an abomination Unicode has become!
literally since i was in college – around 2008 – i started listening to the No Agenda Show. i'd play the podcast in one ear with the other on my pillow with a 30-minute sleep timer and play it over several nights until the next episode came out.
my outlook, my ideology, my perspective on life was partly formed by this man's words.
thanks for everything, John.
Turn off social media, turn off the news. Even local news. It's never going to make you feel good about anything. I get a weekly newsletter digest of happenings around the world and that's all I need.
My daily mood and outlook on life has increased immensely since.
RIP my mentor that you didn't know you were, Valhalla awaits.
Been listening to No Agenda since episode 1. Cranky Geeks and Silicon Spin before that. And the occasional appearance on Computer Chronicles long ago. I always loved your passion for technology and your take on the world. You will surely be missed.
Then along came PC TV and he got introduced to an entirely new audience. He had a blog for awhile and then I lost track of him. Then he reentered my world when he started a SubStack, actually several. One I didn't read and that was where he pontificated on things political.
Then during COVID he touched a live wire on his political SubStack, detailed why he didn't get 'the shot' and why you should too. He also correctly called out the players and what was really going on with COVID. He discovered a third new audience and became an enemy of the administration at the same time. That people was one hell of a career. He will be missed.
Let me guess: a government conspiracy to push something pro-humanity
https://dvorak.substack.com/p/the-covid-decision-tree-part-o...
He wrote about COVID for six years. Someone should compile all those columns into a book or at least a single PDF.
He was a contrarian when it came to tech; I thought he had terrible taste, little sense of what others saw in computation, and little empathy overall; but, he articulated himself well. He was a good writer and occasionally had good jokes. I'll miss him; RIP.
I assume, so that his age related dementia and subsequent paranoia can be studied?
Funny enough the audience was made up of his contemporaries but were completely computer-illiterate. He wanted to discuss heady topics but the Q&A was mostly people asking him to explain Linux (How can it be free? Who owns it?) I could tell he was a bit annoyed to have to get so basic with his audience but I think he kind of somewhat enjoyed sharing a new concept with them.
Glad for all of his contributions, I did enjoy reading his work.
In case you never saw it here's a link to a few episodes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BZF36HhYh8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSlTzR-LWGI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_VjQGOPi8g
Grumpy comedy shows aside ..he was always so supportive of everyone and always interested in their lives, from interns to fellow hosts, everyone got the same amount of interest (and jabs!). He would always say such complimentary stuff about me when others were around. I never forgot that. I regret that we didnt have the time to bring back the show (something he wanted to do).
ITM, RIP
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."Your honesty and directness will always be remembered!
RIP JCD!
(Often yes, in this instance ... I'll give it to him.)
Memorialised on HN no less: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28437158>
Experiencing my formative years in the 90s, and having a PC buff for a dad, we periodically paged through the PC Magazine issues that we would receive by mail, and it was always a fun time. John's articles were funny in a way, and I enjoyed his curmudgeon-y writing. He was also the person I found out about IBM's ill-fated OS/2 from and looked into it in my spare time.
Later on, I discovered he was on a podcast with Adam Curry called the No Agenda Show. I wouldn't say I particularly like the podcast these days, but in the mid 2010s, it got me through some rough times and was like a fun conversation I got to listen to for hours on roadtrips I'd take in California. I even donated a few times, though never quite made it to their roundtable of knights lol.
I'll try and tune into today's show to hear the eulogy.
RIP Mr. Dvorak.
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.
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.
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.
His one page gossip column in the back of PC Mag was pretty great too.
This news makes me kinda sad.
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.
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!
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
It's always a weird feeling when people you 'grow up' with pass away. For me, it's a reminder of my own mortality.
Earlier in this video he gives his opinion on the IBM PS/2: https://youtu.be/yoAH1aHmwR0?t=655
https://vintageapple.org/macuser/
Example Feb 1989, “The NeXT Grand Scheme”
Rest in Peace John, I will shed some tears for you today.
I was sad when he got fired from PC Mag over that 5g column.
He was all about OS/2
Good times
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.
Unrelated, but Buzz Out Loud too.
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.
Rest in peace.
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!
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.
Such a loss, the prototypical cranky geek. Loved his takes with Curry and Leporte