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Computer Chronicles
1984 · TV series · 23 min episodes · 19 seasons
Created by Stewart Cheifet
The Computer Chronicles was an American television series, broadcast during 1981-2002 on Public Broadcasting Service public television, which documented the rise of the personal computer from its infancy to the immense market at the turn of the 21st century. The series was created in the Fall of 1981, by Stewart Cheifet, then the station manager of the College of San Mateo's KCSM-TV, initially broadcast as a local weekly series. Jim Warren was its founding host for its 1981-1982 season. It aired continuously from 1981 to 2002 with Cheifet co-hosting most of its later seasons. Gary Kildall served as co-host for six years providing insights and commentary on products as well as discussions on the future of the ever-expanding personal computer sphere.
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16 comments on Hacker News
Ah, rest in peace. I recommend you watch Computer Chronicles. It’s a treasure. If nothing else, it’s a solid trip down memory lane.
Computer Chronicles, Byte, Compute!'s Gazette, 80 Micro and PC Magazine were windows into the larger world of computers as a kid in the 1980s. The Computer Chronicles episodes on computer networks and services sparked an interest in networking which turned into the focus of the 1st half of my professional career. I owe a debt of gratitude to Stewart Cheifet.
I’m involved in a project to digitize “lost” episodes of Computer Chronicles that were missed in the first pass at the Internet Archive.
You can watch newly digitized episodes here. More are coming in the new year.
https://archive.org/details/@davidga/lists/2/computer-chronicles-re-digitization-project
We’re also building a comprehensive metadata database of every episode. Notably the TVDB metadata is not accurate or complete.
You can see that here, noting that it is still a work in progress.
https://computerchronicles.karpour.net/
I used to watch archived episodes of Computer Chronicles on YouTube almost every night before going to bed back in 2016~2018. It was my bedtime entertainment, watching those recordings from another era of computing and observing the hosts' enthusiasm for things we take for granted today. As a late millennial, it helped me experience a bit of what the 80s and 90s were like in computing.
RIP Stewart.
List of episodes, with direct links to Archive.org streams: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Computer_Chronicles_episodes
I heard that the YouTube channel isn't official and that watching them on Archive.Org is preferred. But they're not especially well organized on the Archive. Here's a link to a torrent with all the episodes, which might be a bit of overkill if you're just trying to find a single episode.
https://archive.org/details/computer-chronicles-full-epidoses
From the obituary:
Stewart Douglas Cheifet, age 87, of Philadelphia, PA, passed away on December 28, 2025.
Stewart was born on September 24, 1938, to Paul and Anne Cheifet in Philadelphia, where he spent his childhood and attended Central High School. He later moved to California to attend college, graduating from the University of Southern California in 1960 with degrees in Mathematics and Psychology. He went on to earn his law degree from Harvard Law School.
In 1967, Stewart met his future wife, Peta Kennedy, while the two were working at CBS News in Paris. They returned to the United States and married later that year. Stewart's career in television production took them around the world, and they lived together in the Samoan Islands, Hawaii, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, before eventually settling back in Philadelphia.
Stewart and Peta had two children, Stephanie and Jonathan.
Stewart is best known for producing and hosting the nationally broadcast PBS television programs Computer Chronicles and Net Cafe. Computer Chronicles aired from 1984 to 2002, producing more than 400 episodes that documented the rise of the personal computer from its earliest days. Net Cafe, which aired from 1996 to 2002, explored the emergence of the internet. Both programs were widely regarded as visionary, capturing the evolution of personal computing and the early development of the digital age.
Stewart's professional interests and talents were wide-ranging. After leaving television production, he worked as a consultant for the Internet Archive, helping to preserve and provide public access to cultural and technological media, including Computer Chronicles and other technology programs. He also shared his knowledge as an educator, teaching broadcast journalism at the Donald W. Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. After retirement, he spent his remaining years enjoying time with Peta, his children, his grandchildren, and his brothers.
Stewart is survived by his brothers Lanny and Bruce, his children Stephanie and Jonathan, and his grandchildren Gussy, Josephine, Benjamin, Freya, and Penny.
Services will be held for immediate family only.
I feel the same towards the "Computer Chronicles", which, IMO, is the best example of unbiased tech reporting that I have ever seen. I still love to watch the old episodes. Unfortunately, even though I have most of the 20 year history of episodes, many are still missing.
Internet Archive, Individual episodes. Unorganized except for seasons. Many different video versions. 965 Gigs: https://archive.org/details/Computer_Chronicles
Internet Archive, single zip file. Re-transcoded, better organized and documented as to Repeat, Missing, and foreign language versions. 83.5 gigs: https://archive.org/details/computer-chronicles-full-epidoses
If downloading from the Internet Archive, there is a CLI tool called "ia".
>jaded in spite of astonishing progress
We've all seen something that looks amazing, but few seem to know what we're looking at.
I am unsettled by what I see as a division of thought between extolling AI's amazing effects on one hand and mysterious regards for how it works and its limits on the other.
Noting Arthur Clarke's dictum that 'technology can be sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic,' AI enthusiasm looks like a Feynman cargo cult.
But technology arousing magical thinking with little discussion of principle of operation and limits is common enough.
This was very much the case with arrival of personal computing: there's something the device is intended to do but most people aren't sure what that is. The devices crashed enough and went out of date so fast you felt ok for not understanding them.
It was even worse with the mobile+web as so much change happened so fast that a generation has been dumbstruck: look at USA politics.
I was looking at old episodes of the Computer Chronicles from early 90s on YT and by that time the show had close to a thousand episodes, but they could barely explain the significance of Windows 3.0 and the Pentium. As to what to expect from this stuff, they didn't even try it was mindless rambling and upsell interspersed with stern warnings from the Software Publishers Association that mucking with the code is a Federal offense. The show's guests all had something to sell with a half life of 3–6 months. For the Pentium episode they show a PC lab with nerds in Dockers (khaki pants) studiously examining how many fans it might take to keep a lanman server from overheating and crashing. Many were amazed by it all.
Also available on YT are old ATT videos, including an introduction to UNIX with Kernighan & Richie. The presentation entirely focuses on the power of the shell. They seemed much more reserved and competent in retrospect, but in its time they looked like a pure priesthood.
Maybe the arrival AI stuff is not so different from the arrival of personal computing?
But AI is basically just one app, and I get the feeling that the scene is far more enigmatic to the point that even the people building the kit don't really know why it does what it does, and no one seems to have a clear idea of what correct functioning means.
For those who don't know, Gary Kildall was also a presenter in the PBS TV show "Computer Chronicles". [1]
I've been enjoying watching episodes of this show I found on YouTube. [2]
[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Chronicles
[2] - https://m.youtube.com/@ComputerChroniclesYT
Gary Kildall was a legend. YouTube “Computer Chronicles”, he appears in a lot of the 1980s episodes.
> Most businesses didn't have one at all, most homes certainly didn't
I think this is wrong. The PC industry had been through a massive stock market boom in the early 80's, and "desktop publishing" was a real thing, not just for early adopters:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_publishing
There was also a TV show on public television:
https://archive.org/details/Computer_Chronicles
why would they do that if it was such a niche?
As for OS/2, Gates stabbed IBM in the back by pushing Windows, as is well documented. He continued to give lip service to OS/2, but anyone with eyes could see that Microsoft's heart was with Windows.
> I'd argue that we're absolutely in the future that OS/2 envisaged
Everyone had the same "vision" back then. Actually bringing it to market is something else again.
I absolutely remember Computer Chronicles, Stuart Cheffet and Gary Kildall. When I was a kid monkeying with home computers, I knew home computers were a thing because there was a TV show about them.
I watched a few episodes on archive.org a few years ago. Thx for reminding me they're all still there.
You might get a kick out of watching old NetCafe or Computer Chronicles episodes on archive.org, fellow netizen. Did anyone ever really use that term? I like to playfully use it after watching NetCafe episodes a few years ago.
The creator and presenter of Computer Chronicles, Stewart Cheifet, donated his personal copy of every single episode of the show to the Internet Archive. It was one of the first, if not the first, video content to be archived there.
https://archive.org/details/computerchronicles
And we must thank him for this, for it is an invaluable history of the rise of information technology. It ran weekly from 1983 to 2002, documenting the remarkable technological (and often social) change in that time.
Side note: It is remarkable that the first few years were co-presented by Gary Kildall, creator of CP/M and founder of Digital Research. He had no presenting experience at all, but still agreed to join the show to provide a more technical perspective.
Archive.org has a lot of collections of periodicals, and there's a lot of interesting stuff in there, especially stuff relating to computer history. They've got the full archives of the old Computer Chronicles TV show on there as well.
But their UI for browsing these collections is unusable. I haven't been able to find any way of exploring these collections chronologically, or searching within the content ofa specific collection or issue and sorting/filtering the results to identify what I'm looking for.
Compare this to the way Google organizes similar collections: here's their archive of InfoWorld, going back to 1975: http://books.google.com/books?id=tDcEAAAAMBAJ