On Learning of the Passing of Stewart Cheifet

There are people whose impact on our life is not understood until we hear of that person’s passing. Time keeps ticking, we know rationally that everyone dies, and yet there are those whom we hear the news and feel a kind of itch; a little part inside that reacts more viscerally than expected.

Stewart Cheifet’s passing on December 28, 2025 gave me that itch.

In a recent blog post I wrote about HyperCard, I used Cheifet’s image from Computer Chronicles at the top, and made a little joke animation later in the same post, referencing the man. I respected what he had built, and also wanted to poke fun at my own obsession over a 40 year-old television show and its host. I’m well into my 50s now; surely there are better outlets for my waning energies.

Computer Chronicles aired on PBS on Saturdays where I lived, just after the cartoon block on network television had wrapped. I was always excited to see what Cheifet and co-host Gary Kildall would spotlight, anxious to witness computers doing things I couldn’t experience anywhere else. It was my glimpse into the near future and I was hooked.

Admittedly, I didn’t understand many of the things they talked about. I didn’t know what CP/M was, or why I’d want it. I had no business to run and hence couldn’t get particularly excited about the latest update to Lotus 1-2-3. At age 14, my eyes positively glazed over when he talked about “Investment Software.” But still, I watched. I listened.

I shifted.

My father, you must understand, loved gadgets and computers, but couldn’t be bothered to understand them. I distinctly recall asking him how our TRS-80 worked. How did it take keyboard presses and do things on screen? He responded, “Magic!”

For him, it was. He loved telling the story of a final exam in college consisting of a single essay question, “What is electricity?” He had answered, “Magic!” and received a B+ from a generous professor who apparently needed the laugh. To dad, that was as good an explanation as anything. “These are unknowable magic boxes, son, but they’re useful for recipe management and biorhythms,” seemed to be his thinking.

Cheifet was my inoculation to dad’s willful ignorance. Computer Chronicles showed me the POTENTIAL inherent to the computer, and importantly that it was just another machine, not magic.

When munitions are fired, tiny shifts to the firing angle can result in wildly different flightpaths for the projectile. Life is no different. The micro-adjustments Cheifet’s work exerted on my own pivot point, those formative years when I realized dad’s ignorance needn’t be my own, absolutely altered the path I took in later years.

In my HyperCard post I concluded, “the only way to appreciate its brilliance is to have it taken away.” Only now do I realize that is also true of Stewart Cheifet.