The Misfit Who Built the IBM PC

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Don Estridge literally gifted the entire personal computing market to IBM. When we first saw him in this series, he was competing with Lore Harp to build the first personal computer. We’ve seen that story from her perspective—now it's time for Estridge's. You might think that the man who ushered IBM into the PC age would have been a central figure within the company, but in reality, he worked in the relative backwater of its Boca Raton, Florida office. This is the story of how Estridge successfully navigated complicated corporate politics to build the iconic IBM PC—and his shocking betrayal. It's the latest installment of The Crazy Ones, Gareth Edwards's monthly column about the forgotten men and women who built the future of technology. Subscribe to Every so that you don't miss out.—Kate Lee

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In a burnished-oak corridor outside the committee room at IBM’s headquarters in August 1980, two engineers pace nervously. Eventually, a door opens. Their boss, Bill Lowe, emerges from the board room next door. Before they can say anything, he smiles and nods. They laugh. They can’t quite believe it. It’s official. IBM is going to try and build a home computer.

Bill Lowe kicked off this ambitious project, but he wouldn’t be the person who would finish it. That role would fall to his successor, a humble, cowboy boot-wearing mid-level executive, out of favor and kicking his heels in the IBM corporate backwater of Boca Raton, Florida. He would take Lowe’s project forward, one nobody else in the company wanted. Just 12 months later, on August 15, 1981, a computer would launch that would change the world: the IBM PC.

This is the story of Don Estridge, the man who brought the IBM PC to market and changed business and home computing forever. In just five years he created an IBM division that almost nobody else in the company wanted to exist. By 1983, it had seized 70 percent of the microcomputer market and was valued at over $4 billion ($12 billion today). Under Estridge, IBM’s PC division sold over 1 million machines a year, making it the third largest computer manufacturer in the world on its own. This story is based on contemporary accounts in publications such as InfoWorld, PC magazine, Time, and the New York Times, as well as books such as Blue Magic by James Chposky and Ted Leonsis; Big Blues by Paul Carroll; and Fire in the Valley by Michael Swaine and Paul Frieberger.

‘Where’s my Apple?’

In 1980, no one senior at IBM wanted to build a microcomputer, as home computers were often called, except its CEO Frank Cary. But one man’s will was far from enough to get things done at IBM, even if he was the CEO.

In the late seventies, IBM was vast. Known as “Big Blue” to its friends and enemies, the company had almost 350,000 employees, ran so many branches, and operated in so many markets that one commentator at the time described IBM as a country, not a company. It made mainframe and minicomputers that filled rooms—sometimes, whole buildings—and cost vast sums of money. It made business electronics, dominated the global market for typewriters, and made millions selling a wide variety of office supplies. A former employee would later describe it even more accurately: IBM didn’t stand for “International Business Machines.” It stood for “International Business Mafia.”

IBM’s huge divisions, spread across the U.S. and the rest of the world, operated like a series of global mafia families. They cooperated when under threat from the outside, and occasionally fought. The heads of those corporate families would regularly come together at the company headquarters in Armonk, New York to form the Management Committee. There, under the watchful eye of IBM’s CEO, they made decisions that would shape IBM’s business empire globally.

Cary started at IBM in 1948. He’d been its CEO since 1972. He had helped it dominate the world of mainframe computing, selling machines that could cost tens—or even hundreds—of thousands of dollars. But he also didn’t believe that the company should rest on its laurels. The Apple II personal computer had been selling in enormous numbers since 1977. At these meetings, he had one question for IBM’s divisional capos.

“Where’s my Apple?”

His divisional heads always had the same answer. Microcomputers—home computing—were a fad. They were low-cost and low-profit. Let others scrabble around in the metaphorical dirt of home computing. The real money was in the markets that IBM’s divisions already dominated—selling vast mainframes and minicomputer systems to large businesses. Cary was even told to buy Atari, which by then had established itself as America’s home video game system of choice. That’s all home computers were good for: gaming.

Frank Cary in 1972. Credit: IBM.

But Cary didn’t back down. In July 1980, he finally forced a concession out of John Rogers, the head of IBM’s General Products Division (GPD). Rogers agreed to set up a project to create a prototype IBM microcomputer—as long as it didn’t come out of his budget.

The answer lay in Boca Raton, Florida. There, lurking near-forgotten in his vast empire of typewriters, photocopiers and other low-level business electronics, was the Entry Level Systems (ELS) Facility, headed up by one of Rogers’s lieutenants, Bill Lowe. It was a leaky, rundown concrete facility that existed primarily to research and prototype basic electronics. Lowe, who was one of the few microcomputer supporters at IBM, was summoned before the Management Committee in July 1980. He was assigned to “Project Chess” and told to create a prototype of a microcomputer. Lowe was given one month to do so, after suggesting to the Committee that one could be assembled from off-the-shelf parts. And he would report directly to Cary. After all, Cary was footing the bill, not Rogers.

To pull off this minor miracle of engineering, Lowe assembled a core team known as the dirty dozen (there were 13 of them in total). They were a mix of engineers and planners taken from a number of different divisions. Mostly, they were individuals who struggled to fit in with the risk-averse, rules-heavy way of working within IBM. Bill Snydes, for example, was a talented engineer who had taken the initiative on a failing project and spun off parts of it into a success. His reward for doing so was a reprimand for going outside of IBM’s standard operating practices. Other misfits, like systems engineer Lew Eggebrecht and software engineer Jack Sam, joined for similar reasons—a chance to work on a project with few limitations.

The project seemed doomed to fail. Mainframe computers were very different from microcomputers, and nobody at IBM had any real experience with the latter. Even if suitable off-the-shelf parts could be found, there was no guarantee those parts would work well together. They’d also need to program their prototype to do something that proved it would work. The risk that problems would occur was high, and they’d been given little margin to fix those that did. But it would be a fun way to spend a month. And as most of them were out of favor within IBM, they had little to lose.

To their own surprise, after a frantic month of development, this team pulled it off. They created a machine that worked. The computer didn’t do much, but it was enough to show the Management Committee.

"The system would do two things. It would draw an absolutely beautiful picture of a nude lady, and it would show a picture of a rocket ship blasting off the screen,” Bill Snydes confessed later. “We decided to show the Management Committee the rocket ship."

This demo, held in August 1980, convinced Cary and the Committee that the work should continue—for now. They told ELS to turn its prototype into a product—and to do everything else needed to take it to market.

Lowe was under no illusions about the difficulty of this task. He was convinced that the project was valuable, but Cary still seemed to be the only senior figure within IBM who agreed. The various division heads wanted nothing to do with the project. But as long as the cost (and any eventual blame) sat squarely on the ELS facility in Boca Raton, they didn’t feel a need to kill it. What the Committee did, instead, was impose a deadline for launch: August 1981. It was another impossibly tight deadline, just one year away.

Lowe headed back from the headquarters in Armonk, New York to Boca Raton with Snydes and Eggebrecht. There, the dirty dozen began the necessary work to turn their prototype into a real machine. But Lowe, who was seen as a rising star within the company, was already being considered for a new, bigger role elsewhere in IBM. Soon his promotion to that position was confirmed.

Lowe believed in the project but didn’t believe he was the right person to do it. Taking it forward would require a unique set of leadership skills. It had to be led by someone who thrived on breaking the rules and who could use the ELS’s newfound position outside the regular financial and management structure to its maximum. Luckily, Lowe knew just the man within IBM for the job—Philip “Don” Estridge.

A company man

Don Estridge turned 43 in August 1980. He had been an IBM man his entire professional life. He loved being able to tell people he worked there. He would tell people that his blood ran big, and it ran blue.

Don Estridge in 1983. Source: IBM.

Yet in many ways, Estridge ran as counter to the grain at IBM as the rest of the dirty dozen did. Tall with a mop of well-kept hair, Estridge wore the crisp suit, shirt, and tie that was the standard uniform for an IBM executive. But he coupled that look with a pair of expensive cowboy boots that often drew frowns from more senior executives. He was a humble man who had no time for flattery and a strong distaste for corporate politics. In IBM, this made him unusual. His fellow senior executives would frequently complain that he failed to return their phone calls, and rarely agreed to join golf sessions or long lunches. And his junior staff noted that he made a deliberate effort never to sit at the head of a table. Estridge believed in collegiality, not seniority.

Estridge was hugely charismatic, although his personal magnetism was drawn from a different source than that of Steve Jobs at Apple or Adam Osborne at Osborne Computing. They were men who sold their own visions. They could create “a reality distortion field” around themselves (a term coined by Apple’s Bud Tribble about Jobs). They could convince you of the value of their ideas and inspire you to give everything in their service.

Estridge was the polar opposite. He listened and supported. His role was to set objectives and provide people with the resources or political cover they needed. This approach inspired a different kind of loyalty from those who worked for him, but it was just as fierce. And it delivered results.

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