© Armonk/IBM/dpa

...Bill Lowe was given a free hand. He was to set to work in the IBM research laboratory in Boca Raton (Florida) with a conspiratorial dozen developers. They were to bypass the notorious IBM bureaucracy and develop a new type of personal computer. Lowe opted for an open architecture without existing IBM technology. However, the IBM technicians had to buy in components from outside, and the IBM engineers did not want to write the operating system for the new PC themselves. This benefited the 25-year-old Bill...