Stewart Cheifet, the tv producer and host who documented the private laptop revolution for practically 20 years on PBS, died on December 28, 2025, at age 87 in Philadelphia. Cheifet created and hosted Computer Chronicles, which ran on the general public tv community from 1983 to 2002 and helped demystify a brand new tech medium for thousands and thousands of American viewers.
Laptop Chronicles lined every little thing from the earliest IBM PCs and Apple Macintosh fashions to the rise of the World Large Net and the dot-com increase. Cheifet performed interviews with computing trade figures, together with Invoice Gates, Steve Jobs, and Jeff Bezos, whereas demonstrating {hardware} and software program for a common viewers.
From 1983 to 1990, he co-hosted the present with Gary Kildall, the Digital Analysis founder who created the favored CP/M working system that predated MS-DOS on early private laptop techniques.
Laptop Chronicles – 01×25 – Synthetic Intelligence (1984)
From 1996 to 2002, Cheifet additionally produced and hosted Net Cafe, a companion collection that documented the early Web increase and launched viewers to then-new web sites like Yahoo, Google, and eBay.
A legacy price preserving
Laptop Chronicles started as a neighborhood weekly collection in 1981 when Cheifet served as station supervisor at KCSM-TV, the School of San Mateo’s public tv station. It turned a nationwide PBS collection in 1983 and ran constantly till 2002, producing 433 episodes throughout 19 seasons. The format remained constant all through: product demonstrations, visitor interviews, and a closing information phase referred to as “Random Entry” that lined trade developments.
After the present’s run ended and Cheifet left tv manufacturing, he labored to protect the present’s legacy as a advisor for the Web Archive, serving to to make publicly accessible the episodes of Laptop Chronicles and Web Cafe.
