Last week eWeek began its series called PC Week at 30. It wasn’t quite 30 years ago when the venerable publication began chronicling our industry. I spent two and a half years working at the publication, and was there during John Pallatto’s first tenure (John wrote the piece above).
But rather than write another column about the way-back tech, or my first byline, I want to take a moment to pay tribute to the people who made up PC Week. Many of the original PC Weekers went on to bigger and better things in the tech industry, and I am proud to count myself as part of them. Here are just a few of them and where they have been since their tenure.
- Mike Edelhart was my mentor and the person who originally hired me on at PC Week. Mike went on to run Zinio and a number of other startups and now is working with Bill Lohse, a former Ziffie, on various conferences.
- Gina Smith was one of our cub reporters who broke many scoops and was a lot of fun to be around. She went on to a startup working with Larry Ellison and working with Steve Wozniak on a book as well as being a tech TV start.
- Greg Spector, who was the West Coast Bureau chief when I was there and went on to found and run a number of PR firms. When I started at PC Week I was living in LA and spent a lot of time in the Bay Area and got to work with Jane Morrissey and Karyl Scott. Jane is running communications for Virtela now and Karyl, after years of working for Nokia, is back on her own.
- Dan Lyons was another cub reporter who would go on to write the “Fake Steve Jobs” columns and more recently briefly run the editorial operations of ReadWrite, where I worked in 2011. He is now blogging for HubSpot.
- Barry Gerber was running the IT department of part of UCLA when I hired him to help me write reviews for PC Week. We would go on to do some ground-breaking testing of network products, and Barry and I would work together on several other publications. He is now running the editorial operations at Tom’s Hardware.com.
- Peter Coffee was working in aerospace IT when I hired him to come to PC Week, where he had a long and illustrious career writing many insightful analyses of application development tools before the cloud ever existed. He left to work for Salesforce.com, where he is still as pithy and interesting as always.
- Sam Whitmore was running the news operations for PC Week when I arrived, and he and I had a rocky relationship at the start. He eventually left the pub to start his own business, where he has been quite successful and where we have become friends.
- Dale Lewallen was working in IT at an LA-based bank when I hired him to be one of our reviews team. He went on to work for several Ziff publications, writing deep technical dives with a thoroughness and zeal that few could match. Sadly, he literally died on the job at an early age.
- Bob Scheier and I started at PC Week at nearly the same time, and like Sam he left to start his own consulting business and has continued to write about computers and business.
- Paul Bonner was my partner in crime at PC Week: we had a lot of things in common and we covered a lot of the same topics for our beats on corporate networking. He left the Boston area and moved to Austin, where he now works in software development for the electric utilities industry. Ironically, one of my first jobs in tech — back when PC Week was founded — was developing software for the electric utilities industry.
- Chris Shipley was a cub reporter back then and went on to run the Demo conferences for many years.
As you can see, it is quite an impressive group. Back then we had a staff of more than 50 people, and that included a full copy desk and art department too. Looking over some of my preserved back issues, I am proud of what the team accomplished. Happy birthday PC Week!
Nice piece, David. It was like being in the Beatles back then, you know? We knew we were big and were having fun, but never really realized just how big — and how much fun — until it was all over. To your list I’d add Jonathan Lazarus, whose idea it was to create a fictitious, feline fact-ferreter named, um… can’t quite recall it…
Where is Spencer Katt today?
I know, just when you need him the most, the Fabulous Feline has flown the coop!
I still have a Spencer pillow case (from an infamous Comdex Party involving Edelhart and a swimming pool).
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My mother edited a quarterly alumnae magazine for Barnard College, back when our team at PC Week produced 130ish pages per week — and we sometimes had to put out two volumes, plastic-bagged, because the page count was too thick to be stapled as one. She found it utterly amazing that we could fill that many pages that often — and I remember one issue where I had 13 by-lines on product reviews, short tech pieces and a column or two. Yes, in just one issue. It was a remarkable episode for both the technology and the publishing industries. Good times with great people.
After all these years, you may not see this question. But just in case, each and every PC Week in the early-to-mid 1980s, there was a really cool column written by a ghost writer. I seem to recall he used a Cat perhaps as part of his alias. “Cool Cat” or “Crypto Cat” or… I just don’t recall.
Who wrote that and do you recall the name of the alias? It was a place for rumors that probably had nuggets of truth, etc. Just a fun column.
Thanks!