Comment by taylodl
1 hour ago
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!
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.