Stewart Cheifet, PBS host who chronicled the PC revolution, dies at 87
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.