Philip Don Estridge was born on June 23, 1937, in Jacksonville, Florida. He died at age 48 in a plane crash on August 2, 1985. At the time he died, he was IBM's vice president. He got a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Florida.
He’s worked for the army, NASA, and, most notably, IBM. Estridge helped build IBM into the multi-billion-dollar company it is today. He led the group that created IBM’s first personal computers (PC). What was revolutionary about the IBM PC was that he made the computer’s design public and used parts and software outside of IBM, which lead to the IBM PC’s architecture becoming ubiquitous.
Philip Don Estridge also had other important contributions to computer science. He worked in NASA’s Goddard Flight Space center working on computers for the Apollo space missions. He designed radar computer systems for the army. The Don Estridge High-Tech middle school in Boca Ralton, Florida is named after him, and he was he was identified in CIO magazine as one of the people who "invented the enterprise".