I knew and have an enduring fondness for PCMag founder David Bunnell, who also started PC World and MacWorld and ran/edited for many years Upside Magazine, the

I knew and have an enduring fondness for PCMag founder David Bunnell, who also started PC World and MacWorld and ran/edited for many years Upside Magazine, the first mass audience publication at the intersection of business and tech. He was from New Mexico and got his start in the industry as a marketing person at MITS, maker of the Altair, where he met Bill Gates and Paul Allen (they worked at MITS before starting Microsoft in Albuquerque). He stayed in touch with Gates for years including at Upside. I have a vague memory Gates invested in one or more of his publications. Or maybe he was just an advertiser. In the end those are pretty similar roles. I’m not sure my point here but I do think this gives reason to pause before you dismiss a marketing “droid” or whatever in the industry. The actual engineering of personal computing has always been intertwined with communicating about it to people.