Father of the first IBM PC, William Lowe, died

The project manager who had given birth to the IBM model 5150 in less than a year, died of a heart attack at the age of 72.

William Lowe, who oversaw the creation of the first IBM personal computer, died on October 19 at age 72. There are more than thirty years ago, on 12 August 1981, he and his team of 12 engineers revolutionized the world of technology by revealing to everyone the first IBM PC: the Personal Computer 5150. The machine, designed in less than a year, then with an Intel 8088 processor running at 4.77 MHz, a 16-bit microprocessor at high speed and could store up to 64K of the side of the system operation, there were an OS straight out of a small start-up led by Paul Allen and Bill Gates and named Micro-Soft computer, sold without a monitor, was then proposed for 1565 dollars.

If IBM was the first manufacturer to offer a personal computer distributed mass, the firm has, however, been the first to conceive. In 1980, the Apple II, and many other machines such as those proposed by Commodore International and running the CP / M operating system already saw their popularity grow at full speed. William Lowe, fresh out of college, he joined IBM in 1962 as a product tester and had left in 1998 after three years at the helm of the PC division. His career was then continued at Xerox as vice president. He later joined the aircraft manufacturer Gulfstream Aerospace in 1991.