David Bunnell, a journalist and publisher who helped create PC Magazine, Macworld and other consumer publications that chronicled and contributed to the explosive growth of the personal computer industry, died on Tuesday at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 69.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, his wife, Jacqueline Poitier, said.

The power and influence of the PC industry press has largely been forgotten in the internet era, but at the time, in the 1970s and ’80s, the magazines Mr. Bunnell published were as authoritative and read as eagerly as Vogue or Women’s Wear Daily were in the fashion world.

Mr. Bunnell was riding a rocket ship. The first issue of PC Magazine was 100 pages, substantial enough by any measure. But the second issue weighed in like a phone book, at 400 pages.

“Getting ads was so easy,” Mr. Bunnell told Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine in the book “Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer.” “All you had to do was answer the phone.”