John Opel, IBM Chief Executive at Dawn of Personal Computing

John R. Opel, who led International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) in the 1980s as it introduced its first personal computer, has died. He was 86.

He died yesterday, IBM said, without citing a cause.

As CEO from January 1981 through January 1985, Opel led IBM into a new era as it put a long-running antitrust investigation behind it and dived into competition with Apple Computer Inc. and others in the home-computer market. The first IBM personal computer, or IBM PC, was introduced in August 1981.

“He challenged people’s assumptions,” Nicholas Donofrio, a former senior vice president at IBM, said of Opel in a statement released by the company. “He was always pushing the edge.”

The antitrust case that ended during Opel’s tenure had been filed in 1969 in the final days of Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency. It accused IBM of anti-competitive practices in the field of “general purpose digital computers” and aimed to split the Armonk, New York-based company. The case hung over IBM for 13 years, until the Justice Department dropped it in January 1982.
‘Big Is Bountiful’

Opel made the cover of Time magazine on July 11, 1983, for a story titled, “The Colossus That Works: Big Is Bountiful at IBM.” The company’s earnings of $4.4 billion on sales of $34.4 billion made it the most profitable U.S. industrial company in 1982, according to Time.

Under Opel’s direction, IBM “has been acting like its brashest competitors -- entering new markets, chasing the latest technology, trimming organizational fat and selling more aggressively than ever,” Time said.

IBM shares returned 117 percent during Opel’s four-year tenure as chief, more than five times that of the Standard & Poor’s 500 index, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
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