Bill Lowe - 'Father of the PC'

William Lowe was the person who convinced IBM to produce personal computers that targeted individuals rather than businesses as IBM traditionally did. As laboratory director of IBM's Entry Level Systems, he was able to convince the IBM top brass to give him free rein to do so, and even though Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had created the Apple computer, Lowe created the IBM PC using the Intel 8088 processor which went on to become the standard for PCs. (Interestingly, they didn't use the more advanced 8086 processor since they thought it would be too powerful and compete with their high end business products.) It is the small decisions that change the course of history forever - To get an operating system, the story goes, the IBM team went to Digital Research (on Bill Gates' suggestion) to ask them to port their CP/M operating system to the 8088. Apparently the founder Gary Kildall was out flying his plane (or something like that) and his wife would not sign the non-disclosure agreement. The team then went to Seattle to talk to Microsoft about obtaining, not an operating system, but just a version of BASIC. Gates talked to them about an operating system too, and seizing the opportunity, Gates bought an 8086 operating system from Tim Patterson at Seattle Computer Products, reworked it, and sold it to IBM as PC-DOS. (The rest, to use a cliche, is history).

Interestingly, Tim Patterson created the operating system (known as QDOS - Quick and Dirty Operating System) in six weeks by reading the CP/M manual. He sold it to Microsoft for $50,000, never knew about Microsoft's deal with IBM and eventually went to work for Microsoft in 1981. IBM let Microsoft retain rights to the OS so that it could sell the OS separately from the computer. The computing world was never the same again, and so was Microsoft. This would probably be one greatest business deals ever!

Bill Lowe was at Phoenix to give the inaugral keynote presentation at the Insight Technology Expo where he described his IBM story. A webcast of the presentation is available here.