He will be missed. I still remember fondly he would fly around the floor of the West Coast Computer Faire on rollerskates, going everywhere to make sure it was running smoothly.
I eagerly awaited every issue. It taught me a lot, in an era where finding information about computers was pretty difficult. I was in junior high school, and none of the books in the school or public libraries covered any of this fancy new "microcomputer" stuff.
Inspired by DDJ, I remember writing my own versions of PILOT and a "Tiny BASIC" with floating point, in Z-80 assembly, a couple years before I got my first computer. Probably still have those notebooks somewhere, I'm sure that code is terrible :-)
I'm grateful to DDJ for its liveliness, breadth of subject matter (okay, "randomness"), and simple enthusiasm for teaching people about personal computing.
I used to read it in the city library, and once I even borrowed a whole year's journals to binge-read. I learned a lot of coding techniques from articles in it back in the day.
When I was growing up, I saw Triumph of the Nerds by Bob Cringely on PBS. About midway through as I recall there's Jim Warren sitting in a hot tub with a killer view talking about the West Coast Computer Faire and early computing. I had only recently started coding in QBASIC then Visual Basic. Seeing that documentary helped cement my interest in programming and computers in general.
