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  • Hacker News
  • Oh man, that's an old school name.

    I miss cranky geeks, to the point where I've gone back to listen to older episodes.

    by chollida1
  • How can you miss cranky geeks when HN is full of them?
    by otterley
  • I miss them so much, I became one!
    by ChrisMarshallNY
  • I do too and was lucky to help work on the show with him, was a total blast and humor was really a part of it as well which I loved
    by carlosrodela
  • > I miss cranky geeks

    Read my cranky posts about what an abomination Unicode has become!

    by WalterBright
  • 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.
    by greatquux
  • RIP, gonna mis listening to your conversations with Adam, link to the last no agenda show (podcast): https://www.noagendashow.net/listen/1887
    by relex
  • 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.
    by mvdwoord
  • RIP

    Their podcast is one of the last bastion of independence: no ads, all funded, produced, developed, self hosted by a group of volunteers.

    by sunshine-o
  • https://www.pcmag.com/authors/john-c-dvorak

    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...

    by 1970-01-01
  • I first become aware of John C. Dvorak in Byte magazine, ( back in the 80s?) to me he was a respected insigtful interesting content wrighter.

    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

    by asdefghyk
  • 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.
    by CodyMorley
  • Rest in Peace, John.

    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?...

    by speak_plainly
  • 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!
    by taylodl
  • Fortunately Jon Udell is still pretty much alive and kicking.
    by pantulis
  • 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.

    by bborud
  • 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.

    by brucehoult
  • 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.
    by mrandish
  • 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.

    Trivia: I took both the pics of him on his wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum

    by e40
  • 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.
    by barney54
  • 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.
    by _-_-__-_-_-
  • Heh, my trajectory exactly.
    by UqWBcuFx6NV4r
  • 39 reporting in, John is the only personality I kept tabs on from those early days. While like many here, I took issue with some of the content on No Agenda, I still listened to quite a few shows even quite recently. He and Adam could get into vicious on air battles, but in the end you could tell they deeply respected and cared for each other. I'll miss his rants and his strong (and frequently wrong) opinions.
    by sadsach
  • 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.

    RIP.

    by maximinus_thrax
  • Wow, you’re my twin! I’d watch these on XBMC/Xbox Media Center with some other video podcasts - it was a magical moment in tech
    by bonsai_spool
  • Credit to him, he always had a bold take.

    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.

    by ColdStream
  • > he always had a bold take

    Often quite literally, in his PC Magazine columns!

    by adamrezich
  • > 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?

    by dylan604
  • 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 fraXis
  • Most of what I know him for was coming on TWiT, driving Leo Laporte nuts, and making claims that ended up not coming true.

    He was a hilarious curmudgeon. He will be missed.

    by donatj