Stewart Cheifet
I heard the news that Stewart Cheifet has died:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/01/stewart-cheifet-pbs-host-who-chronicled-the-pc-revolution-dies-at-87/
https://obits.goldsteinsfuneral.com/stewart-cheifet
I used to watch the Computer Chronicles a lot. It was a good show but the thing I really remember was the Cheifet "cutoff" - when he was done interviewing a person he would just walk away at the end, no closing words, just an abrupt transition :)
My last job was at a company called Powercore in Manteno IL. It was a Windows "shop" but they were expanding into Mac software at the time - later the whole Mac team (3 people) quit at the same time. The main product at Powercore was called Network Scheduler (see the video below for details). This was before the internet had really arrived. Powercore had a dialup BBS to deliver software updates. If an important customer was having trouble getting into the BBS one of the guys would go in and just hangup on the current BBS user to let the important customer in :)
It was also where (and when) I found out about the Y2K problem, this was 1994. Our customers (like the DOD) informed us of the problem, some people do think 6 years into the future. Network Scheduler had a big email component - I remember my boss had me sit down with the VP of sales who was a very intense young woman who knew a LOT about email and protocols and stuff - while listening to her talk I decided that I'd just have to quit the job, I could have cared less about our product - we never actually used Network Scheduler at Powercore except for testing it out. And I cared nothing about the micro details of how email works.
Other things that irritated me about Powercore were that our customers were termed: "seats" (which is the way the industry was). Also while Network Scheduler was in effect copy protected, Powercore management basically encouraged the employees to steal the software they needed to do their jobs. Finally I was also driving over 100 miles total from Northlake to Manteno everyday. Previously I could walk or ride to my job at GTE. I'm glad I quit Powercore.
Stewart Cheifet's death reminded me of this groupware episode of the Computer Chronicles (note that while the video quality is OK the audio level is kinda low, Powercore is the first segment after the credits):
https://archive.org/details/1125
BTW Stewart did give Powercore's president a grin and a thanks at the end of the segment
so maybe he wasn't as abrupt as I remembered :)
And here is a screen shot of Network Scheduler:
 |
| one million lines of code |
Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm
