Mr. Patrick (Pat) Joseph McGovern

Chairman and founder of International Data Group (IDG), a company that includes subsidiaries in technology publishing, research, event management and venture capital. He is a trustee of MIT. He was listed on the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans in 2007 as having a net worth of $4.7 billion. By 2010, his net worth was $3.1 billion, a decline of 35% from 2007.[1] Forbes magazine claims he earned a scholarship by designing an unbeatable tic-tac-toe program (now a trivial programming task, but no mean feat in the 1950s). He worked at the MIT student newspaper The MIT Tech on the features staff during his sophomore year. He has been observed to have a remarkable memory and apparently demonstrated it while an undergraduate, according to people who knew him at MIT. McGovern received a degree in course 7, or biology/life sciences, from MIT, in 1960. [2] For a time, he was an editor of Computers & Automation magazine, the first computer magazine in the world, founded, published and edited by Edmund C. Berkeley. He started International Data Corporation (IDC) with a friend in 1964, which produced a computer industry data base and published a newsletter, EDP Industry & Market Report. He started the weekly newspaper Computerworld in 1967.