PC Magazine publisher Bunnell dies at age 69

at MITS, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, went on to found Microsoft. Bunnell stayed in Albuquerque and developed his first general-interest magazine for computer users, Personal Computing, in the late 1970s.

“The idea I had when I created Personal Computing,” he said in 1984, “was that the personal computer market needed a consumer magazine that was for non-technical people who wanted to get something out of the computer without knowing how to program it.”

When the magazine’s publisher refused to give Bunnell an ownership stake, he quit and moved to San Francisco. He found a job as a word processor while conceiving the idea for another magazine built around the newly launched IBM personal computer.

Working from a spare bedroom in his house, Bunnell and a small staff put together the first issue of PC Magazine, which debuted in January 1982. He was publisher and editor-in-chief.

It was an immediate success, combining technical articles with cheeky, opinionated writing, glossy photography, colorful graphics and profiles of rising stars in the world of technology.

“He produced his magazines in the language of the man on the street,” Samir Husni, director of the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi, said in an interview. “He was an artist in terms of humanizing the machine. He destroyed the wall between the computer and the consumer.”

Flush with the success of PC World, Bunnell premiered yet another magazine, Macworld, designed to appeal to users of the new Apple Macintosh computer. The first issue came out on Jan. 24, 1984, the same day Apple’s Steve Jobs publicly introduced the Mac.

Even as he became a publishing wunderkind and high-tech millionaire, Bunnell remained an activist at heart. In a PC World editorial in 1986, he lambasted Georgia’s anti-sodomy laws as a form of discrimination that would undermine the state’s goal of becoming the Silicon Valley of the South.

Shortly before his death, Bunnell completed a memoir, “Good Friday on the Rez,” about his experiences on the South Dakota Indian reservation and at Wounded Knee. It is expected to be published next year.