Frederic Emery Davis (born June 17, 1955), known as Fred Davis, is a veteran US technology writer and publisher who served as editor of A+'' magazine, MacUser, PC Magazine and PC Week; personal computer pioneer; technologist; and entrepreneur involved in the startups of Wired, CNET, Ask Jeeves, Lumeria, Jaduka, and Grabbit.

Davis was born at the Yale New Haven Hospital while his father was enrolled at Yale. Davis's father was Dr. Donald Davis (deceased), an IBM Fellow and the creator of the "learning organization" management practice (while a professor at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands). Davis's mother was Doris Davis (deceased), an educator, artist, and longtime director of the Upward Bound project at Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine.

Davis attended Friends Academy, in Locust Valley, New York, from kindergarten through sixth grade, while his mother was an English teacher and assistant principal. In 1966 Davis enrolled at Eaglebrook School, in Deerfield, Massachusetts, where he spent grades 7 through 9 and graduated in 1970. In 1966 Davis, then age 11, learned computer programming, by participating in the testing and development of the BASIC computer language via a time-sharing hookup to Dartmouth College, where BASIC was being developed. In 1970 Davis enrolled at Northfield Mt. Hermon School, in Northfield, Massachusetts, where he spent his sophomore and junior years. He spent his senior year of high school at Collins Brook School, in Freeport, Maine. The school was modeled after and run by former educators of the progressive Summerhill School in Suffolk, England. Davis graduated in 1973 from Collins Brook, where his senior class consisted of only six people. In 1978 Davis enrolled in Antioch College and completed his B.A. in botany. The Wall St. Journal described Davis as "a teen-age prodigy who earned a B.A. in only one year." In 1979 Davis continued at Antioch College, and he earned his M.S. in Ecosystems Management in 1981. In 1980 Davis enrolled at Union Institute & University as a degree candidate for a PhD in Information Technology. His dissertation was titled "Computer Assisted Publishing," and although Davis did not complete his PhD, the dissertation formed the groundwork for a book he coauthored—Desktop Publishing—one of the first books to be published on that topic.

In 1974 Davis bought Lougee's, a greenhouse and florist business in Belfast, Maine. He expanded the business to include North Star Orchids, an orchid nursery that was a major importer of orchids in 1975 and 1976. During that time, he designed and established a commercial plant tissue culture laboratory for North Star Orchids; the lab was one of the first commercial plant tissue culture labs to use a laminar flow hood based on millipore filters for aseptic lab work, at a time when glove boxes were the standard aseptic tissue culture work areas. Davis invented a new type of plant tissue culture vessel based on millipore filters for respiration, and that invention was published in Orchid Review, where it received international attention. It was cited in subsequent scientific papers and eventually became part of the standard design of almost all types of labware that needed to provide aseptic respiration.

In the late '70s, Davis moved from Maine to San Francisco, where he became one of the early personal computer pioneers working with CPM-based systems. Davis bought an original Apple II in 1977 and emerged as an early Apple II programmer, due to his prior knowledge of BASIC, the language that computer used. Davis was among the first computer engineers to successfully connect microcomputers to mainframes, connecting his Apple II with Stanford's DEC PDP-10 while conducting research on database publishing at Stanford. Davis also served as a computer consultant to large corporations and venture capitalists in the early days of the industry.

Davis held several executive positions at technology magazines from 1983 to 2002. Davis was the editor of A+, MacUser, PC Magazine, and PC Week; a columnist and writer for Wired; and the publisher of dig_iT.

In 1983 Davis became one of the founders of Ziff-Davis's computer publishing division and worked on the startup of ZD's first computer publication, A+, which rapidly became the leading publication about Apple computers. Later, during Fred's tenure as editor-in-chief, A+ won the Computer Press Association award for Best Computer Magazine. From A+, Davis moved over to serve as editor-in-chief of its sister magazine MacUser, where he founded MacUser Labs. He oversaw the development of the magazine during its period of greatest growth, bringing it up to parity with Macworld.

Next, Davis joined PC Magazine, which, at the time, was the world's leading computer publication in terms of revenue and circulation, with an annual revenue of approximately $250 million. As editor of PC Magazine and director of PC Magazine Labs, he helped develop benchmarks and scripts for testing thousands of products under review. Later, as editor of PC Week, he founded PC Week Labs and developed industry-standard benchmark tests for corporate computing. After leaving PC Week, which was located in Massachusetts, to return to California, Davis helped launch and served as a columnist for several other Ziff-Davis publications, including Windows Sources, Computer Life, Family PC, and the ZD Personal Computing newspaper supplement.