Today the tech world says goodbye to John C. Dvorak, who passed away on Monday, July 20, 2026, at the age of 80, following complications from recent heart bypass surgery. He is survived by his wife, children, and grandchildren, and remembered by colleagues and readers as a writer who never softened an opinion to make it more comfortable.
A voice from the golden age of tech magazines
My own memory of Dvorak goes back to 1992 or 1993, when I was working in the IT department of a cable manufacturer in Brazil. The company had subscriptions to two or three of the great American tech magazines of the era — PC Magazine, InfoWorld, and, I believe, Byte in its golden years. Somewhere in those pages I ran into Dvorak for the first time, and it was immediately clear this was a writer with strong, unfiltered positions on technology, unafraid to say a product was garbage or that an entire company was heading in the wrong direction. At a time when most technical writing was dry and procedural, his columns had a voice. He wrote for exactly this kind of press — InfoWorld and PC Magazine both carried his columns for decades, and Byte was part of the same world of serious, opinionated computer journalism that shaped how an entire generation of IT professionals thought about the industry.
From print to screen — and beyond
By the late 1990s and into the 2000s, Dvorak had carried that same directness onto television and, eventually, podcasting. His appearances on Computer Chronicles — the long-running PBS show that served as one of America’s first mainstream windows into personal computing — captured that same instinct for opinion and showmanship that print alone couldn’t fully contain. It’s easy to see, watching those episodes now, why the leap into broadcasting felt inevitable for him: he was a natural in front of a camera the same way he was sharp on a page. He went on to appear on CNET Central, NPR, and ZDTV, and later co-hosted the tech show Cranky Geeks.
That instinct for media eventually led him to podcasting, where in 2007 he teamed up with Adam Curry to co-host No Agenda, a show he kept doing right up until his death — nearly two decades of consistent, opinionated broadcasting.
Even in his blog writing, that same instinct for a good, opinionated story never went away. His “Whatever Happened To…” series, still archived on dvorak.org, is a good example — pieces like the one on MSX computers dig into forgotten corners of computing history (in that case, Microsoft’s failed attempt at a home-computer standard in partnership with Japan’s ASCII Corp.) with the same critical eye he brought to his columns decades earlier.
A career that spanned the whole arc of personal computing
Dvorak’s career is really a map of the entire personal computing era — from the earliest days of 8-bit home computers, through the PC and internet booms, into the age of podcasting and blogs. He started as a wine columnist before pivoting to technology, became a fixture at InfoWorld and then PC Magazine (where his column ran for decades), and never stopped writing, broadcasting, or arguing his point of view, right up to the end.
RIP John C. Dvorak.
