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Right Idea, Wrong Title

However, that magazine was not PC World. It was PC Magazine, which would later become our archcompetitor. When its print run swelled to over 150,000 by the fourth issue, Bunnell and crew realized they needed more funding. The majority owner, software executive Tony Gold, shopped the magazine to potential buyers--including two big names in publishing, Ziff-Davis and IDG. Bunnell and his crew openly preferred the latter. "Pat McGovern [IDG's founder and chairman] flew out to meet us, and we liked him," Bunnell says, whereas the Ziff-Davis people seemed to him aloof by comparison.

On Friday, November 19, 1982, McGovern and the owner both called to say the deal was done and that IDG was the buyer. But when he arrived for work the following Monday, Bunnell found two Ziff executives waiting for him. Apparently they had gone to see the owner late Friday night and had made him a better offer. "I said, 'I have to talk to my attorney,'" Bunnell recalls, "and walked out."

McGovern, an amiable bear of a man with razor-sharp competitive instincts, showed up in San Francisco the next day. "We met him at his hotel room," says Cheryl Woodard, Bunnell's business partner. "He wanted to put out a magazine called 'PC World' to compete with PC Magazine. We drew up a contract, created a budget, and wrote the business plan over the next few days."

The following Monday, Bunnell, Woodard, McGovern, and a handful of others were prowling the vast Comdex trade show in Las Vegas wearing homemade "PC World" buttons and passing out business cards fresh from the printer. "We came back with orders for over 100 pages of advertising, so it was a good start," Bunnell says.

They were soon joined by all but 4 of the original 52 PC Magazine staffers. Bunnell moved this crew into a former soap factory, where they worked out of two giant rendering vats that had been turned into offices, rushing to publish an issue before Ziff-Davis could obtain a court injunction to forbid its appearance.

That 324-page inaugural issue, with its odd green logo and cover story written by Karl Koessel (still one of our senior technical editors), has many features that seem quaint today--such as a list of modem-based PC bulletin boards that could accommodate only one user at a time. But it set the tone for all the issues that followed.

Under the leadership of editor Andrew Fluegelman, PC World went beyond simple technology to cover how people were using PCs for everything from financial management to games. It battled for less repressive software copy protection, among other causes. And it launched a companion publication, Macworld, to bring the same uncompromising journalism to the realm of Apple machines.