The man responsible for shepherding the original IBM PC to life in a single year, William C. Lowe, has died at 72. After he convinced then-CEO Frank Cary that such a machine couldn't be built quickly "within the culture of IBM," a team of 12 engineers called the "dirty dozen" was assembled under his leadership. They designed the iconic computer using off-the-shelf pieces like the Intel 8088 CPU and Microsoft's DOS 1.0 operating system. The resulting $1,565 IBM Personal Computer kicked off the PC revolution and was even named Time's "man" of the year in 1982. Ironically, IBM's commitment to open-sourced parts and software helped spawn the competition that eventually torpedoed its PC division, which was sold to Lenovo in 2005. Lowe himself parted company with IBM in 1988, later saying that his team wasn't trying to change the world and just wanted "IBM developers to work on IBM products" -- not Apple's.
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