Father of the IBM PC dies, 72

The tech world lost another of its pillars this month with the passing of William C. Lowe, the father of the IBM Personal Computer.

 

Lowe died at Lake Forest in Illinois at age 72 last Oct. 19. His daughter Michelle Marshall said he died of a heart attack, according to a report on The New York Times.

 

He is survived by wife, Cristina; four other children, Gabriela, Daniel, Julie Kremer and James; and 10 grandchildren.

 

Born on Jan. 15, 1941, in Easton, Pa. Lowe attended Lafayette College in Easton on a basketball scholarship.

 

He earned a degree in physics and became the first in his family to graduate from college.

 

Lowe is credited for leading a team at International Business Machines (IBM) in building a low-cost machine that would bring the PC to the masses, by using hardware and software made by "outsiders"—and surprising IBM when he pulled it off in a year's time.

 

IBM's first PC, the Model 5150, was unveiled on Aug. 12, 1981. It ran on MS-DOS 1.0, made by then small company Microsoft. The central processing unit alone cost $1,565.

 

The machine, in IBM's own words, "set a worldwide personal computing standard and helped to establish a multibillion-dollar industry."

 

At the time, an IBM computer often cost as much as $9 million and required an air-conditioned quarter-acre of space - and 60 people to run it.

 

The boom of the PC greatly benefited Microsoft, Intel and other companies whose products were used for the PC - but also gave birth to clones, sold and marketed by companies like Dell as “IBM compatible” machines.

 

Backing Steve Jobs

 

The NYT report said Lowe shortly backed the late Apple co-founder Steven Jobs, who in 1985 had left Apple and was developing his NeXT computer platform.

 

In 1988, Lowe left IBM and joined Xerox to help it expand beyond basic copy machines.

 

In 1991, he became president of corporate jet maker Gulfstream Aerospace Corp. He also held posts at New England Business Services and the Moore Corp.

 

'Project Chess'

 

A separate report on CNET said Lowe and his team worked on the IBM PC under the codename "Project Chess."

 

The team included 12 engineers dubbed the "Dirty Dozen," who designed and built a prototype personal computer dubbed Acorn in one month.

 

The 5150 PC featured a 4.77-MHz Intel 8088 microprocessor and came with 16 KB of RAM, expandable to 256 KB.

 

It earned what could be its closest distinction to Time magazine's Man of the Year award - a Machine of the Year award instead for its Jan. 3, 1983 issue. — TJD, GMA News