OBITUARIES / PASSINGS / Jack D. Kuehler

Jack D. Kuehler, 76, who served as IBM’s vice chairman during the 1980s when the company dominated the global high-tech industry, died Dec. 27 in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., as a result of complications from Parkinson’s disease, said his daughter Christi Kuehler Chappell.

Kuehler’s achievements include guiding IBM into the open-standards PC workstation business, which resulted in a computing platform that is still the foundation of the company’s designs today.

He also was key in forging IBM’s alliances with Intel and Hitachi, as well as the creation of Sematech, an industry-government alliance founded in 1987 to help save the U.S. semiconductor industry.

Kuehler later teamed IBM with Apple and Motorola, a partnership that resulted in the PowerPC microprocessor that became the basis for Apple’s computers from 1994 to 2006.

“He was the best of class of a generation of computer engineers in the mainframe era,” Andrew Grove, former chief executive and chairman of Intel, told the New York Times.

Born in Grand Island, Neb., Kuehler graduated from Santa Clara University with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering.

He started his lifelong career at IBM as an associate engineer at the San Jose Research Laboratory in 1958.