The end of 2025 brought news of the passing of Stewart Cheifet, creator of Computer Chronicles, and Net Cafe, two shows about electronics and computers that are, depending on your personal history, critical pieces of your knowledge of Computers or a show you might never have heard of. Running on PBS stations throughout the country for years, these shows brought a sense of fun and curiousity to computer technology, business and related subjects. In many cases, these interviews are among the only easily-found references to the people and subjects being discussed.
There is an excellent obituary in the New York Times, but it should be also be remembered how much of a thread of collaboration existed over the decades, between Cheifet and the Internet Archive.
The most prominent exhibit of Stewart Cheifet’s collaboration are the Computer Chronicles and Net Cafe collections at the Internet Archive, where hundreds of episodes are freely playable and downloadable.
These programs, usually a half-hour in length, included different segments and presenters, although Cheifet was a constant. The format would range from news stories to on-set interviews with the creators, business owners, and users of various computer technologies. The show ran from 1983 to 2002, splitting off Net Cafe in the 1990s.
A notable aspect of these shows are the wild variety of subjects, many still relevant in the present day, being presented and discussed as they burst into the consciousness of comptuer users. Desktop Video Editing, Virtual Universities, Cyber Privacy all make appearances, as do terms long out of the lexicon, like Push Technology.
“I hold him in such high esteem,” says Brewster Kahle, digital librarian of the Internet Archive. “He was always great work with, and had that fantastic voice.”
After being interviewed for Net Cafe about the plans for the Internet Archive, Brewster asked Stewart about the archive of episodes of Computer Chronicles and Net Cafe. Chiefet said he wished they were available. The Archive offered to host any digitized files, and the project began.
After landing a Hewlett Foundation Grant, the Computer Chronicles archive was digitized and put on the Internet Archive in collaboration with Rick Prelinger, who also had a collection of video and digitized film at the Archive.
In the era of streaming servies and Youtube, it is very easy to forget how rare and difficult large-format video files were to provide to the Internet at large, even into the early 2000s. Files would often be available only on FTP sites and the torrent protocol was extremely new. To be providing such files for a wide audience of these materials was a difficult prcoess.
By Brewster’s recollection, the shows have been re-encoded a half dozen times across the decades, from RealMedia to MPEG-1/MPEG-2, flash video. and currently in MPEG-4. (The original high file-size originals were kept through all these upgrades).
“Over all these decades, he was the real guy,” says Brewster. “This was a guy who was willing to put his creation on the Internet, for free. A guy who wasn’t just a journalist, or observer, but was trying to make the Internet go, and he came and worked with us to make us go.”
During his time with the Internet Archive, “Stewart worked with other organizations to bring items to the Internet Archive. Many were gummed up by contracts – he then offered Creative Commons licenses.” Support of Creative Commons has continued with Internet Archive uploads ever since.
The Re-Digitization
Standing as it had for almost 20 years, the Computer Chronicles collection was extremely popular, garnering hundreds of thousands of views along the episodes. However, there was one notable angle beyond its longevity – the oversights.
Small imperfections had existed across the hundreds of digitized episodes: Various episodes were missing, and some had missing tracks of sound.
A few years before he left California, Stewart Cheifet donated his collection of Computer Chronicles and related media from his personal collection to the Internet Archive, where they were transferred to Physical Storage. These included every tape digitized by the initial project, as well as other tapes that were unlabelled or mislabeled.
Meanwhile, another group of fans and enthusiasts had begun the process of creating a website to list every single known episode of Computer Chronicles and verify all the related data.
This group, the Computer Chronicles Archiving project, requested access to the stored physical tapes and began verifying them against the list, discovering that some tapes contained multiple episodes, or were in different formats from the initial digitizing run. Ultimately, they began re-digitizing episodes from the ground up, starting with missing episodes.
The results of the Computer Chronicles Re-Digitization project have been successful so far, with missing episodes restored for posterity, and improvements to some previous episodes as well.
Computer Chronicles: The Encore
With such wide availability, it was inevitable there would be a cultural reference or parody referencing Computer Chronices, and it came in the Adam Lisagor-produced Computer Show, where two hosts from the 1980s interview modern (2016) web celebrities. The gimmick was that the hosts didn’t understand any reference to computer technology past their own time, providing confused looks any time the interviewee referenced them.
As part of ongoing experimentations in access to visual media combined with automated transcription and subject searches, the GDELT project created a Computer Chronicles Visual Explorer in 2023.
There’s more projects and use to come – because of the open licensing, the episodes of Computer Chronicles on the Archive will be available for reference, research, and evidence of a time when computers and online life had an entirely other flavor. While Stewart Cheifet is no longer with us, his lifelong project of bringing computer technology and experience to a wide audience and his connections to so many who have formed the Computer and Web experience live on.
