Stewart Cheifet, the television producer and host who documented the personal computer revolution for nearly two decades on PBS, died on December 28, 2025, at age 87 in Philadelphia. Cheifet created and hosted Computer Chronicles, which ran on the public television network from 1983 to 2002 and helped demystify a new tech medium for millions of American viewers.
Computer Chronicles covered everything from the earliest IBM PCs and Apple Macintosh models to the rise of the World Wide Web and the dot-com boom. Cheifet conducted interviews with computing industry figures, including Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Jeff Bezos, while demonstrating hardware and software for a general audience.
From 1983 to 1990, he co-hosted the show with Gary Kildall, the Digital Research founder who created the popular CP/M operating system that predated MS-DOS on early personal computer systems.
From 1996 to 2002, Cheifet also produced and hosted Net Cafe, a companion series that documented the early Internet boom and introduced viewers to then-new websites like Yahoo, Google, and eBay.
A legacy worth preserving
Computer Chronicles began as a local weekly series in 1981 when Cheifet served as station manager at KCSM-TV, the College of San Mateo’s public television station. It became a national PBS series in 1983 and ran continuously until 2002, producing 433 episodes across 19 seasons. The format remained consistent throughout: product demonstrations, guest interviews, and a closing news segment called “Random Access” that covered industry developments.
After the show’s run ended and Cheifet left television production, he worked to preserve the show’s legacy as a consultant for the Internet Archive, helping to make publicly available the episodes of Computer Chronicles and Net Cafe.
In a comment on Slashdot, Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, remembered meeting Cheifet during a Net Cafe interview and later collaborating with him to bring the show’s archives online: “After it I asked what he was doing with his archive, we kept talking and he founded the ‘collections group’ at the Internet Archive and helped us get all of Computer Chronicles on this new site and so much more. Wonderful man, and oh that voice!”
As a result of that collaboration, most episodes of the show remain freely available on the Internet Archive, where they serve as a historical record of the personal computing era. A re-digitization project that involves Cheifet’s personal tapes is underway to recover episodes of Computer Chronicles that were missed in the original archiving effort.
Cheifet was born in Philadelphia on September 24, 1938, and earned degrees in mathematics and psychology from the University of Southern California in 1960. He later graduated from Harvard Law School. In 1967, while working at CBS News in Paris, he met Peta Kennedy, whom he married later that year.
In addition to his television work, Cheifet taught broadcast journalism at the Donald W. Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. In a 2014 interview with the school, he explained why he pursued both law and journalism: “They are the two legal revolutionaries. They are the two professions that allow you to change the world without having to blow someone up.”
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