Heinz Nixdorf, Small Computer Entrepreneur
Heinz Nixdorf, the founder of West Germany’s biggest computer manufacturer, who came to epitomize the German postwar image of a self-made man, died Monday of a heart attack.
A company spokesman said that he was 60 and that he collapsed at a business reception.
Nixdorf transformed his passion for electronics into a worldwide concern that last year had sales of nearly $1.8 billion.
He set up his first workshop in a cellar as a struggling 27-year-old student in 1952 with $13,000 in government aid and one assistant.
His first breakthrough came in 1958 when he sold a transistor system for an adding machine to a manufacturer.
Today his company employs more than 23,000 people, with factories in Ireland, the United States, Singapore, Brazil and Spain as well as West Germany.
The leading West German business magazine Wirtschaftswoche described him last year as “Germany’s most successful postwar entrepreneur,” and in 1984 Fortune magazine voted him European manager of the year.
