Remembering John C Dvorak of PC Magazine

I heard the sad news on the Windows Weekly Podcast that the legendary technology writer and journalist John C. Dvorak is no longer with us. He passed away on the morning of Monday, July 20, 2026, at the age of 80, from complications following heart bypass surgery. My condolences to his family.

To me, as a young student living in the late 1980s and early 1990s who tinkered with PCs, Dvorak was almost a God. His word on anything about the then nascent personal computers was gospel. I resonated with his writing more than most because, like me, he loved the PC, MS-DOS, and Windows, and his dislike for the Mac was legendary.

Growing up in what was then called as Madras, India, in the 1980s, with no internet yet, my introduction to his writing was through his regular column in PC Magazine. Every month, I would go to great lengths to get my copy, starting with older issues from local libraries, the British Council Library, and any other source I could find. Later, once the magazine became available for sale in India, sometime in the mid-1990s, I bought most issues of PC Magazine I could lay my hands on.

Peter Norton‘s column was what I went looking for first. But it was Dvorak‘s page I ended up staying with. An issue of PC Mag in those years was a brick of a magazine, hundreds of pages of benchmarks, motherboard reviews and advertisements. Somewhere in there was a man arguing, quite confidently, that most of the industry had got it wrong again. He was not always right, but to a young man like me, his confidence in his own opinions was something to behold. His words shaped my early thinking on technology, and Bill Gates‘ books went on to solidify it.

Looking back through my own blog here, I find I wrote about him twice.

In March 2004, during the Netsky outbreak, when every financial daily was carrying a story about a new exploit, I linked to his PC Mag column asking why virus attacks were getting worse. His answer was not better laws, not tougher punishments, not better software. His answer was to license computer users the way we license car drivers, with exams and a pass or fail. I remember thinking it was an absurd idea, and also that I could not immediately explain why it was absurd.

The second time was in June 2007, in a post about blogging, where I noted his irritation at large websites pushing out ordinary web pages and calling them blogs. He was annoyed about the loose use of the word. That was very much him, not opposed to the technology, only impatient with the careless and incorrect usage.

After the 1990s, as he slowed down his writing and PC Magazine itself faded away, I lost touch with his works. Then in the 2010s, I started listening to his guest appearances on Leo Laporte‘s This Week in Tech podcast, and that is when I learned more about him. That was the first time I put a face and a voice to the words I had read for years, and it was a wonderful feeling.

What I take from him, sitting here in 2026, is this. In a world that is now drowning in AI-generated slop, here was a man who held strong opinions and had the courage to raise them against the largest companies, without fear or favour. In a time when everyone from heads of state to influencers seems content to simply parrot the opinions of tech billionaires, a voice like his will be sorely missed.

Thank you, Mr Dvorak, for the columns I scavenged for as a schoolboy in Madras and for teaching a generation of us that reading technology writing and agreeing with technology writing are two entirely different activities.

May his soul rest in peace.