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I like that his Wikipedia page really sells that he was a Kentucky Colonel. That was one of the easier titles I've gotten.
Hey rosrepa... I want to go down your rabbit hole & collect some titles... would you be kind enough to recommend some easy ones to start with?
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I could not agree more. You might love him, you might hate him. But he was a fixture in the Golden Age of Personal Computing.
He was definitely controversial, as evidenced by the rating on the grandfather post.
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!
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.
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. Trivia: I took both the pics of him on his wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum
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.
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!
I'm going to post something that contradicts this outpouring of fondness for the late Dvorak. While I did enjoy his friendly curmudgeon act in the days of TWiT, I was very dismayed by him jumping in bed with that paranoid crackpot and I blame him for a lot of toxic ideas that he helped spread in his No Agenda show years. Maybe his earlier act was the mask and the latter John C Dvorak was the real persona. Or maybe th…
I remember him from listening to TWiT in the 00's/10's so I'm out of the loop. Who's the paranoid crackpot?
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There's no shame in not knowing something or inferring wrong conclusions from facts you do know. From left to right the first 6 keys of the top row are: ',.pyf Which isn't as catchy as Dvorak.
Unfortunately python scripts turn out to be not as vulnerable to character escaping exploits. Character escape, in this context, of course, refers to the keys themselves flying out of the keyboard, this being a hardware product and all.
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!