John C. Dvorak

On the night of July 19, 2026, John C. Dvorak sat down at a microphone in Northern California and did what he had done twice a week for nearly two decades: traded news and commentary with his longtime broadcast partner, Adam Curry, on their podcast, No Agenda. It turned out to be his last show. The next morning, the show's official account announced that Dvorak, the technology columnist and broadcaster who had been arguing with the computer industry in print and on air since the 1980s, had died. He was 80.

Dvorak's byline was, for a long stretch of American computing history, hard to avoid. He became a contributing editor at PC Magazine in 1986, eventually writing two separate columns for the publication, including the long-running "Inside Track," and produced more than 4,000 articles and columns over his career, according to his own website, dvorak.org. He also served as an editor at InfoWorld and wrote for Forbes, Barron's, MacUser, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the San Francisco Examiner.

He moved into television and radio as early as the medium allowed. Dvorak was part of the startup teams behind CNET TV and the network ZDTV, later rebranded TechTV, where he hosted the program "Silicon Spin" for four years and about 1,000 episodes, and he was also part of the startup team at CNET Networks, later appearing regularly on MarketWatch TV, Talking Biz News reported. He also hosted the video podcast CrankyGeeks and was a regular voice on This Week in Tech, which by his own account drew roughly 500,000 listeners a week. His commentary won him three national awards from the American Business Editors Association between 2004 and 2006.

In October 2007, Dvorak and Curry released the first episode of No Agenda, a twice-weekly podcast that ran without advertising, supported instead through what the hosts called a "value for value" model of listener contributions. The show became a fixture for a loyal and argumentative audience, and Dvorak kept recording it almost to the end: on July 19, 2026, the day before he died, he co-hosted the latest episode from Northern California, just as he had for nearly nineteen years. "For tech journalists of a certain age, there was a time when everyone knew him," fellow technology writer Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols wrote in a tribute posted the day the news broke.

Dvorak's work spans four decades of PC Magazine columns, a run of early technology television from CNET TV and TechTV, and nearly nineteen years of No Agenda, the podcast he started with Adam Curry in 2007 and kept recording until the week he died. All of it remains online, in the archives of the outlets and shows he built, for anyone who wants to revisit his take on the news.