On Tuesday, October 18th, technology journalist David Bunnell, who also founded PC Magazine, PC World and Macworld, passed away in his home in Berkeley, California. He was 69 years old.
Bunnell, whose career included working at MITS in Albuquerque, New Mexico, worked alongside Microsoft founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen.
Bunnell attended the University of Nebraska from 1965 to 1969, graduating with a B.A. in history, was active in the anti-Vietnam war movement and was elected president of the Students for a Democratic Society.
He worked as a public school teacher in Southside Chicago from 1969 to 1971, with wife, Linda, who was also a teacher. The couple transferred to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota as teachers.
Over the course of his career, Bunnell would go on to found a number of publications, including BioWorld, PC Magazine, PC World and Macworld as well as found the Macworld Expo trade shows in 1985, which at their peak ran on both the east and the west coasts, filling convention centers in both Boston and San Francisco at the time and allow Mac users from all walks of life to gather and share information.
Bunnell was also known for socially conscious and philanthropic work, founding Computers and You, a computer-skills center in San Francisco’s notoriously hardscrabble Tenderloin neighborhood in addition to his other efforts.
Bunnell is remembered fondly as a tech entrepreneur who saw computers as tools to be used by people and not ends unto themselves. His publications helped explain and demystify the technologies that came on the market, making them more accessible to the reader while also diving into the technical ends and explaining what was available. This, along with a reported joy that came in giving computers away to people who genuinely needed them, made him a rarity, especially in the fast-paced tech world.
He will be missed.
Via Fast Company