I’m quite late to finding out about this, but it’s quite awful to learn. I was hoping he’d be able to complete his documentary of Gary Kildall, but that may never happen now.
He died on December 28th of last year from the flu.
Rest in peace, Stewart.
I think he brought an interesting perspective to the table as a “BestBuy geek” as I think he put it somewhere, someone who isn’t a technical expert but is interested in the field.
I never watched the show when it aired but I binged it on YouTube about 10 years ago now, and it’s a common source of quasi ASMR background noise while I’m at work (gotta love the chunky CLACK-CLACK of those old Model-M keyboards)
At least the YT channel I found the archive on goes from 1983 to I think around 2001 or 2002. One of the last episodes I remember seeing introduced the original xbox. One of the more surreal things you can do is shuffle a playlist of all the episodes. In one they’ll be gushing about some new tech fad, and the next episode will be from two years later after the fad has run its course. I learned from this show there was an AI fad back in the mid-80s and a VR craze in the late 90s. Interesting to see history repeats.
Speaking of repeating history, you can see that Nintendo was all about FOMO and artificial scarcity even back then. There’s an interview with some random mom complaining that she can’t find a SNES.
It’s also interesting to see how the format of the show changed over time. It started out as an educational program but gradually morphed into a tech review show as the audience went from “what’s a computer?” to “what’s the latest gadget?”
I got way off topic here.
