John C. Dvorak, a pioneering technology journalist, podcaster, and cultural commentator, passed away peacefully on the morning of Monday, July 20, 2026. He was 80 years old. For tech journalists of a certain age, there was a time when everyone knew him.
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@sjvn RIP John, I remember coming home from school in the late 90s to watch Silicon Spin on ZDTV and reading your opinion pieces in PC Magazine. Always remember you gushing over the Apple G4 Cube and how perfect it was gonna be for you and your spouse.
@sjvn I read his stuff for ages. So many hours of enjoyment. He will be missed. We are not likely to see his kind again. 😢
@sjvn Knew him indirectly (emailed back and forth a few times). He'd "correct me" when I'd poke at him over Linux stuff. He will be missed.
@sjvn oh this is just horrible news 😥. RIP
@sjvn The best ever clip of John was him taking apart an IBM PS/2 on Computer Chronicles and then not knowing how to put it back together (10:55): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoAH1aHmwR0
@sjvn Oh, crap. I used to work tangentially with him, at TechTV it must be. He was the BMOC when I was coming up, a wee slip of a girl in the industry just about to blow up. I enjoyed his work. Safe home, John. 🥀
@sjvn presumably he will carry on getting no spam in heaven
He gave me the idea to approach writing my book in bite-sized chunks.
In an episode of "Cranky Geeks" he said "Hell, write 200 words a day and in a year you have a novel."
Though I never met the man, I did stand next to him while waiting for a cab outside a hotel once.
@sjvn I haven’t followed him for a long time but TechTV was transformative for me and I watched him a ton on Silicon Spin and TwiT. RIP.
@sjvn - I remember Dvorak from This Week in Tech with @leo. I just uploaded a photo of them with Patrick Norton at the opening of the "TWiT Brickhouse" in Petaluma, July 2011:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:TWiT_Brickhouse_opening_20110724-1193.jpg
(I have more pix from that event on Flickr, but they're all watermarked with my deadname; I'll edit the rest eventually.)
@sjvn one of the early highlights of my pre career tech life was getting my website mentioned in his column. RIP
@sjvn Ahh, that sucks. I used to read his stuff all the time.
@sjvn Oh, that is sad news. Was there any tech magazine for which he didn't write?
@withaveeay There were a few, but not many. He started his career at InfoWorld and at Ziff-Davis, the publisher I always end up writing for over and over again; he was in pretty much every magazine. I edited him at Computer Shopper.
@sjvn @withaveeay I always remember saving his column at the back of PCMag for last, after I had read all the other columns, features, and checked in on memory prices. (The more things change…)
Computer Shopper was a tome.
