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!

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brucehoult a day ago | parent | next [-]

Pournelle was good as a kind of (relatively) non-technical user in the early days (70s, early 80s) who just wanted to use computers to write books.

Dvorak was quite good, but for me much too oriented towards the Wintel world.

And then there was another guy who was sooo consistently bad I referred to him as Less Than Thorough. I'm not sure now whether he was also the MIT economist who died in 2016.

Robert X. Cringely (Mark Stephens, not those later writing at IDG under that name) was by far the best of the bunch, though was somewhat late starting writing columns only in 1987. He knew his stuff, correctly predicted trends etc. And continues to today at cringely.com, so that's a 40 year tech pundit career so far.

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dredmorbius a day ago | parent | next [-]

I referred to him as Less Than Thorough...

Almost certainly Lester Carl Thurow (May 7, 1938 – March 25, 2016).

I've read that sobriquet a few times myself. I suspect his economic ideas were more premature than wrong.

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brucehoult a day ago | parent [-]

I've never read any of his economics (didn't know until today that he was one) and formed an opinion based only on his tech press writing. Interesting that he was on the board of TSMC!

> I suspect his economic ideas were more premature than wrong.

I don't think economics is a time-dependent field.

Apparently he favoured more government involvement in industry, which I believe has rarely if ever worked out well anywhere. Government officials are very very bad at predicting what will actually work or sell well, are too risk-averse to back the true winners preferring CYA to prove that failure wasn't predictable or their fault, no real skin in the game so easily swayed by dinners and sports tickets and personal favours, and almost always double down on failed ideas and companies rather than admitting they got it wrong.

Provide a safety net for individuals, by all means, but not for companies.

	▲	dredmorbius a day ago \| parent [-]
		Re: ...more government involvement in industry,... See the American School of Economics (19th century), China from Deng onward, industrial policy in Japan (Meiji Restoration, post-WWII), Germany (pre- and post-WWII), Israel, South Korea (post-WWII, particularly 1970 onward), the US (particularly FDR/WWII, also Cold War and much since), just off the top of my head. Whilst it's quite true that government involvement can go bad, it can also go quite well, and as with many matters, the distinction generally isn't between regulation and no regulation, but effective vs. ineffective regulation. If you read Adam Smith, you'll find that much of what he inveighs against is actually economic power compounding upon itself to interfere with what would otherwise be more productive economic organisation and activity. Protectionism and monopolisation (Smith's term was engrossment) have been harmful for many centuries. A more recent but fascinating account was compiled by Bernhard J. Stern in 1937, published as "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations": <https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag...>. Markdown (my own effort): <https://rentry.co/szi3g>. Corporations are also very bad at predicting what will actually work or sell well, are risk averse, practice CYA, and ... seek to sway those susceptible to dinners, sports tickets, and personal favours, etc., etc., etc. There may even be a role for safety nets for companies, as operational concerns, but in which investors remain at risk. That is, yes, if your country is fundamentally reliant on, say, a well-functioning electrical (or other) infrastructure, banking / finance sector, pharmaceutical industry, manufacturing network (especially networks of smaller parts suppliers and service providers), then act to stabilise these when exogenous factors other than superior competition threaten them, but don't bail out the investors. Money can be sourced from elsewhere, but capital equipment, institutional knowledge, and market relationships can be easily destroyed and take many years or decades to restore, if at all.

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ghaff a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Well, Dvorak was primarily a writer for PC Mag for many years so that was pretty natural.

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pantulis 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Fortunately Jon Udell is still pretty much alive and kicking.

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bborud 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The immature 1980s industry was a lot more fun than any decade since. The problem with the future is that when it arrives it tends to bring amazing things, but they are still executed in a way that is disappointing, annoying and clumsy.

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.