Last Updated on February 5, 2025 by Dave Farquhar
David Bunnell was the founder of three of the most successful computer magazines of all time. He even edited two of them simultaneously, straddling two very different worlds.
He was not only a pioneer of tech journalism, he is one of the all-time greats. Bunnell wasn’t just a great tech journalist. He would have been great in any specialty. I am sad to say they don’t make them like him anymore.
Starting young
Journalism was in David Bunnell’s blood. His father was the managing editor of the Daily Times Herald in Alliance, Nebraska, a small town in rural western Nebraska. He started his journalism career early. At an age when most budding journalists are editing their high school newspapers, he was editing the sports section of his Daily Times Herald.
His college degree wasn’t in journalism, but it was in history. But the best college minor for a journalist is history, because if you understand history, then you can write about current events and put them in proper context. So it is not surprising that he could major in history and become a great journalist.
David Bunnell at MITS
In 1974, he took a job at MITS, the company who produced the Altair 8800. Originally his job was writing user manuals. Later, he produced a newsletter for them. While he was working at MITS, he met a couple of guys named Bill Gates and Paul Allen. You might have heard of them. It was Bunnell who wrote an editorial that inspired Bill Gates’s anti-piracy open letter, which Bunnell then printed in the newsletter, but then also circulated to other publications to help it reach a larger audience.
After Altair, Bunnell’s career had enough parallels with Wayne Green that it is entirely possible to confuse the two men.
Personal Computing
His first magazine was a magazine called Personal Computing, which he founded in 1977. My dad subscribed to personal computing briefly when I was a kid, but this was long after the Bunnell era. By then, it was a general purpose magazine, differentiating itself from Byte or Creative Computing by focusing on business use of computers. As a 12-year-old, I didn’t like it all that much, but I was definitely not the target audience.
Bunnell didn’t lose control of Personal Computing so much as he walked away. His financial backers refused to give him a 10% steak in the magazine, so he pursued other options.
He took a job in a typing pool so he would have a source of income while he figured out what he was going to do next. It wasn’t long before Adam Osborne came calling and hired him to edit books. He worked for Adam Osborne until he got his next big idea. And that’s where his career really became a tangled web.
PC Magazine
Bunnell’s next big idea was a magazine simply called PC. He saw the success Wayne Green was having with 80micro and decided to copy it, with a focus on the IBM PC. He even called up Bill Gates and got an exclusive interview with him to run in the first issue. Bunnell helped Gates in the past, so Gates was happy to oblige.
Bunnell lost control of PC after just eight issues. Ziff, the large magazine publisher, approached his financial backers and purchased the magazine out from under him. He objected to the non-consensual loss of control, and so did the overwhelming majority of his staff. Bunnell and 48 of his 52 staff members left, and they went to Ziff rival IDG, the same company that had purchased Wayne Green’s computer magazines. They proposed starting over with a similar magazine with IDG’s backing.
PC World
That seems like an offer you can’t turn down, and IDG didn’t turn it down. Both Ziff and Bunnell accused each other of stealing their magazine, and Ziff sued to try to prevent IDG from using the letters PC in the title of their new magazine. They didn’t win, so Ziff carried on with something it was now calling PC Magazine, while IDG called its magazine PC World. Ziff located staff to replace the 48 people who left, but considerable similarities in the two magazines’ approaches persisted. The main difference between the two was PC Magazine contained a higher amount of technical content, including programming content. PC World almost never delved into programming. PC World took more of an end user approach. Its ideal reader was someone like me, who users a computer all the time, is very interested in power user shortcuts, tips, and tricks, but doesn’t program any more than he has to.
Macworld
In 1984, Bunnell decided he needed to start one more computer magazine. That magazine was Macworld. He saw the Apple Macintosh as a platform with a high amount of upside and wanted to launch a magazine covering it as early as possible.
For that issue, he managed to get a photo shoot so Steve Jobs would appear on the cover along with three Macintoshes. That was a story in itself. Jobs famously hated being photographed, so they pre-staged everything that they could using a stand-in so Jobs could come in, stay for 15 to 20 minutes, and then leave. Jobs objected during the whole shoot. Then, weeks later, he tried to pull out, saying he didn’t want to appear on the cover anymore. Bunnell said it was too late to make a change, it was already at the printer. Jobs didn’t question him, so he ended up on the cover. It was the only time Jobs ever did a photo shoot for a magazine cover. His other magazine cover appearances used licensed photographs.
Bunnell edited both magazines for most of the decade, keeping one foot in two very different worlds. I always wondered why it seemed like PC World had no animosity toward the Mac whatsoever, and this would explain why. Even after Bunnell stepped down, it seems like it remained a tradition.
David Bunnell versus Wayne Green
Bunnell and Green were contemporaries, although Green was a bit older. Their careers have some interesting parallels, although the two men had very different personalities.
Green was from the East Coast. He claimed he was born in New York, and he lived most of his adult life in Peterborough, New Hampshire, a small rural town about an hour from Boston. Bunnell grew up in rural Nebraska, a town called Alliance. The closest major city is Denver, about 3 and a half hours away. Rural Nebraska and rural New Hampshire have a somewhat different feel. As an adult, Bunnell lived in Silicon Valley.
Green was a conspiracy theorist. It is possible to be either a left wing or a right wing conspiracy theorist, and the further beyond the pale you get, the harder it becomes to distinguish the two. It tends to have a wrap around effect. But based on the other things I know about Green, I am inclined to believe he was a right-wing conspiracy theorist. Bunnell, on the other hand, was a social justice warrior. A social justice warrior from rural Nebraska. I don’t know how often that used to happen, but it happens less frequently now.
Bunnell was a multi-millionaire and a philanthropist. Green claimed to make four figures most years. The IRS wasn’t buying it, but it’s clear Green was no multi-millionaire. He owed back taxes, but he didn’t have the money to pay it. It took years for him to pay it back.
Despite their many personal differences, the two of them had one thing in common. At least when it came to running their computer magazines, they were excellent examples of classical journalists. They didn’t exist to serve their advertisers, they existed to serve their readers. Advertising was a means to subsidize the publication. If a company made a bad product, they weren’t going to pull any punches.
PC World and Macworld coexisted brilliantly next to Wayne Green’s magazines at IDG because David Bunnell ran his magazines exactly the way the editors Wayne Green hired ran his.
His legacy
Bunnell died October 18, 2016, at the age of 68. The career path David Bunnell took doesn’t exist anymore, and the attitude and approach that David Bunnell had doesn’t get you very far anymore.
But he left a stellar legacy in the form of decades of print magazines that he founded, and the contents of many of them are fairly widely available online. If you want to study the history of microcomputers or personal computers, you can do much worse than perusing old issues of PC World, Macworld, PC Magazine, and even, dare I say, Personal Computing.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
I remember the first pc magazine was april 87 ps/2
That is cool – Ironically, I know another David Bunnel.