The man who made Britain love computers

The man who made Britain love computers

Guy Kewney
1946-2010

Guy Kewney, who has died aged 63, was one of the UK's most influential IT journalists, said BBC Online. Sometimes referred to as "the man who made Britain love computers", he predicted the technology revolution in the very first issue of the magazine Personal Computer World (PCW), back in 1978. "From here on in," he wrote with remarkable prescience, "the history of the computer will be the history of society, not just of calculators." And throughout his long career as columnist and interviewer, he displayed the same uncanny knack of foretelling the technological future. It was Kewney, for example, who foresaw the dominance of Google from the moment its first, minimalist website appeared in the late 1990s. Yet by a quirk of fate, Kewney would achieve widest fame for an interview in which he didn't even participate. In 2006 he was due to speak to BBC News 24 about a legal wrangle between Apple and the Beatles, when, in an extraordinary blunder, another man - a Congolese job applicant named Guy Goma — was ushered on in his place. Goma's evident terror and meaningless replies to the presenter's questions on live TV became a YouTube sensation.
Born in South Africa, Kewney moved to Britain in the 1960s,

where he trained as a civil engineer, then worked as a programmer for English Electric Leo Mar- coni Computers. But his real gift was for journal- ism, said Kelvyn Taylor on Computeractive.co.uk. In his influential Newsprint column in PCW, or in publications such as PC Dealer and PC Magazine, he would come to the rescue of the general reader by "peeling away the obscuring layers of technology". In person he was eccentric - he habitually wore socks and sandals - but that only added to his charm, said Manek Dubash on The Register, as did a phenomenon that came to be known as the "Kewney Chaos Field"- an unknown force that prevented any piece of technology ever working in Kewney's hands.
Yet there was nothing clumsy about his interviews, said Dubash. With unfailing politeness, he would always ask just the right question, leaving respondents squirming and often revealing far more than they intended. (Yet some relished his directness. During the time he sold computers, Alan Sugar used to say that Kewney was the only journalist he'd speak to.) Since being diagnosed with cancer last year, Kewney documented his struggle with the illness on his blog with typical humour and insight. He is survived by his wife Mary and their two daughters.