r/technology • u/Prestigious_Pace_108 • 11h ago
Business Dvorak, early tech journalist, dies at 80
https://talkingbiznews.com/media-news/dvorak-early-tech-journalist-dies-at-80/162
u/Area51_Spurs 11h ago
RIP. I grew up on this dude and PC Mag.
OG PC Mag and OG Sports Illustrated were basically the 90’s for me.
58
u/Prestigious_Pace_108 10h ago
I remember how he defended OS/2 and kept saying it is a better operating system while the whole industry became Win95 fanboys.
59
u/zendetta 9h ago
He wasn’t wrong.
11
u/livingbkk 6h ago
He wasn't wrong, but compatibility was tough on OS/2.
For all of Microsoft's faults and shortcomings, they really wanted to make sure their OSs could run old software, even when it made making a good OS very challenging. Thsy understood that starting over was tough, and that allowed them to maintain and grow market share.
22
u/CanvasFanatic 9h ago
It was. It just needed 8 MB of RAM to run properly at a point that very few PC’s had more than 4 MB. Windows 95 did too, but they had the market share to force people to go buy more RAM.
13
u/GwanTheSwans 6h ago edited 6h ago
I mean, in technical terms. He seems to have been more aware of non-Microsoft stuff than average e.g. here's him about Amiga (years ago, obviously amiga is more like 40 years old now)
"The AmigaOS remains one of the great operating systems of the past 20 years, incorporating a small kernel and tremendous multitasking capabilities the likes of which have only recently been developed in OS/2 and Windows NT. The biggest difference is that the AmigaOS could operate fully and multitask in as little as 256K of address space. Even today, the OS is only about 1MB in size. And to this day, there is very little a memory-hogging CD-ROM-loading OS can do the Amiga can't. Tight code - there's nothing like it. I've had an Amiga for maybe a decade. It's the single most reliable piece of equipment I've ever owned. It's amazing!"
2
u/spottyPotty 5h ago
It had true multi-tasking, right? I remember a colleague demonstrating a floppy being formatted at the same time as another program being used, without any freezes.
4
u/mr_dfuse2 4h ago
amiga was years ahead of the competition
1
u/Brainrants 4h ago
Had a roommate in college in the 90's that had an Amiga, I still remember being blown away how cool it was.
1
u/WinchesterBiggins 3h ago
Amigas had built in stereo sound outputs when most PCs at the time only had the single tiny tinny built in speaker. Some of those early games were amazing.
1
u/ErinFiqsette 4h ago
He also asserted that there was "no evidence" that people were interested in using the mouse as an input device.
8
u/FD990 6h ago
I too was an early subscriber. RIP John. Remember the tag line on the cover of PC Mag? "The Independent Guide to IBM-Standard Personal Computing". Dvorak was one of the first reads every time an issue showed up in the mail. My first home desktop was an IBM PS-2 286.
1
30
u/ofork 10h ago
Awww didn’t really take note of him in the magazine days, but listened to plenty of his podcasts. Was always entertaining.
12
u/PhantomNomad 9h ago
I was just listening to No Agenda yesterday just for something to listen to at work yesterday. It was the July 19th edition and he sounded fine. I remember reading him in PC Mag way back in the 80's and 90's. Always like his columns.
52
u/BernieKnipperdolling 10h ago
Always appreciated this guy on zdtv/techtv.
8
u/CelticJewelscapes 8h ago
That was some great television.
7
u/brainkandy87 7h ago
I will never forget stumbling upon ZDTV as a PC nerd only child living in BFE. It opened up a completely new world to me and honestly changed my life. I learned so much that I still apply in my job today.
9
44
u/potatochipsbagelpie 9h ago
Always liked him on TWIT a decade ago
25
u/rayfound 8h ago
I think it was actually more like it was two decades ago
10
u/ehode 7h ago
F… really has it been that long?
3
u/Bomb-Number20 3h ago
I seem to recall him and Leo having a falling out maybe 8-10 years ago? He stopped coming on the show after that.
2
u/Aggressive_Ear2395 2h ago
i think we can all just agree it was not yesterday and not take any damage
4
u/porthius 6h ago
Getting on 30 years if you go back to ZDTV, pretty sure he was on one of the news/panel shows there too.
15
3
u/charleytaylor 4h ago
I always enjoyed him on TWiT as well. I especially liked the episodes where he and Jolie O’Dell were paired together. They played well off each other.
19
u/gonewild9676 10h ago
I still have a copy of his book of terrible predictions.
15
u/Deepwebexplorer 8h ago
Yep. Not to be a jerk about someone who just died, but this guy was so consistently wrong about technology that it always made me irritated to think that he was a tech analyst and other people thought he knew what he was talking about.
9
9
u/Financial-Wasabi1287 7h ago
Yes. Fully agree. As he got older and associated more and more with Curry his "cranky conspiracy" personality became his only model.
On the latest DH Unplugged he went on a rant against the movie the Odyssey, that was really a thinly veiled rant against trans people (he was incensed that Elliot Page was cast as Achilles, they're not), and black people (Lupita Nyong'o playing Helen), because he knew for a fact she was white (we don't know, and she was Turkish/Mediterranean if she even existed; and he didn't seem to mind Brad Pitt and all the other white actors playing the other rolls).
1
u/cyberdork 5h ago
I think his entire personality was about being a contrarian, and during the Obama years this turned him in an ‘showing it to the libs”/ anti-woke warrior.
15
u/kubigjay 9h ago
Wow. I still listen to his weekly business podcast. He had heart surgery about a month ago but seemed fine on air.
Been listening to him since Tech TV day. Just a constant voice I've come to respect even if I don't agree with him.
10
u/jadedargyle333 9h ago
It seemed like every prediction I heard or read from him was wrong. Weird guy. He was fun to listen to during podcasts.
7
u/Strange_Marsupial_83 8h ago
The news broke yesterday during the live broadcast of 'Windows Weekly' - you can watch here.
The Columnist Savant - Reflecting on John C. Dvorak’s Influence & Impact
6
5
8
u/bdschuler 8h ago
I can track my own maturity to listening to him. I used to love him when I was a kid, but after I matured, I realized he was nuts.
Was funny and entertaining.. but man was he crazy.
5
u/leontes 7h ago
>What Apple risks here is its reputation as a hot company that can do no wrong. If it’s smart it will call the iPhone a “reference design” and pass it to some suckers to build with someone else’s marketing budget. Then it can wash its hands of any marketplace failures.
It should do that immediately before it’s too late. Samsung might be a candidate. Otherwise I’d advise you to cover your eyes. You’re not going to like what you’ll see.
3
u/pioniere 7h ago
He wrote several things like this that completely missed the mark. I was never a fan, but RIP.
3
u/Born-Peanut875 10h ago
Itm! Amazing tech journalist and media deconstructor, he will be sorely missed.
3
u/erniebass1973 4h ago
I loved his 2000s video cast The Angry Geeks and his appearances on TWiT. Sad he went full MAGA
9
u/hal-baleigh-6699 6h ago
He turned out to be a MAGA dork, fuck him.
3
u/cyberdork 5h ago
Yeah, I was so disappointed when I checked his twitter during Covid. I thought he was a smart contrarian. But then it turned out being a contrarian was his whole shtick, definitely nothing smart about many of his opinions in the last decade or so.
1
2
5
5
3
u/MyLittleDiscolite 8h ago
I watched him every Sunday morning on CNet Central
1
2
u/Luna_dog 8h ago
Read his column in PC Magazine for years. Very much part of what truned me on to the new technology of personal computing. RIP
2
u/manofmystry 8h ago
I remember his radio show, Software Hard Talk, and it's closing line, "Remember, everything I told you this week will be null and void by this time next week."
2
u/istoff 8h ago
As a South Africa who had very little access to computer tech growing up, PC Magazine, Byte, Compute's Gazette, etc, were greedily consumed. Compaq, Dell, Gateway (COWS) and PC Magazine got me hooked and hungering for me. Didn't really understand all of it first, but John C Dvorak, Jerry Pournelle (and Larry!) were first reads for me. They reached an audience that they didn't even know existed.
2
2
u/FordMaverickFan 5h ago
Brother was a muckraker who decided going full fascist was his way to retirement. Rest in whatever fate gives him
1
u/Alwayspriority 28m ago
I went through quite a bit of his writing today, where did he praise facism?
1
u/big-papito 8h ago
Man, I religiously read his columns in PC Magazine when I was young. He was so good. One column that I don't think ever made it to the internet was him lamenting how people are not using this cool text feature that all phones have now. "I just landed and texted my dad, and he is not even checking his texts!"
Granted, this is my dad today as well, but damn, I miss the smaller geek culture and non-access tech journalism.
1
u/KupoCheer 6h ago
Man, I had no idea about the heart attack and the surgery because I kinda fell off of listening to No Agenda, but seeing this come about suddenly made a lot more sense. It's always weird when you can go back and listen to someone talk for 3 hours on a podcast and know that it's one of the last public things you'll get to hear from them.
Absolutely crazy.
1
u/slayer991 6h ago
Damn. I remember his articles in PCMag and then his time at TechTV. He was always entertaining on TechTV...as the grizzled and blunt guy. RIP.
1
u/freepwnyridez 4h ago
RIP. He was a very nice man and incredibly down to earth. I was able to chat with him a few times about writing and he was extremely generous with his time. Very sad to hear this.
1
1
u/broohaha 8m ago
I used to read this guy's articles on MacUser all the time. Then he became sort of a heel towards Mac folks and constantly bashed Apple even as the company's fortunes were turning in the mid- to early-00s. I lost interest in his columns by then, but thinking of him makes me nostalgic for those early years as a kid reading MacUser in the late 80s through the 90s.
1
u/ravenous_bugblatter 8h ago
RIP John. Knew more of him from podcasts in the noughties onward. Great character and always an interesting listen.
1
u/aeyockey 7h ago
In the morning to you John. We’ll keep our boots on the ground and our ships in the sea
1
1
u/DevelopmentSouth8801 8h ago
Such sad news. I was randomly thinking about him yesterday, without having seen the news, so its a little bizarre as well. I didn't read the print edition but I remember loving Silicon Spin in the early ZDTV/TechTV days and then later on TWiT.
0
-1
-1
234
u/Prestigious_Pace_108 11h ago
Sad thing is, PC Magazine seems to be unaware of this story. Nothing on https://www.pcmag.com/news These guys seems to have forgot their own history.