I wrote regularly for PC World and NeXTWORLD from 1988 to 1993. The magazine had high standards and my editors, Robert Luhn and Wes Nihei, were demanding, drivi

I wrote regularly for PC World and NeXTWORLD from 1988 to 1993. The magazine had high standards and my editors, Robert Luhn and Wes Nihei, were demanding, driving me to find ways to enliven laser printer "roundups" with language that was colorful, engaging, and sometimes over the top ("This HP LaserJet, like a Clydesdale of workhorse printers, delivered consistent performance..."). Every day that I write, I remember them, and wish I had them around to improve my prose. But this is the Internet and we no longer have editors. PC World deserves a eulogy and a better one than this from its archival Ziff-Davis. In those days, magazines created communities. Readers became part of a magazine's world, identifying themselves, forming affinity groups, despite geographic isolation, and without barriers to participation. Something like Hacker News in that regard. The publisher, the editors, the writers, and the advertisers fostered the creation of the community, and the communities created by the computer magazines of the 1980s and 1990s created our technology culture as much, and maybe more, than any single individual or Silicon Valley company. Yes, we say Steve Jobs was a genius, but part of his genius was realizing he needed David Bunnell, the founder of PC World and a former radical political organizer, to create a magazine for the Mac if his new computer was going to succeed. The dirty secret of that time was that Steve Jobs paid Bunnell to publish MacWorld (and later, NeXTWORLD) and the Apple community arose from it. The origin of our present world lies as much with David Bunnell and PC World as with Vint Cerf and DARPA but, sadly, there's no one to tell the tale.