Patrick Joseph McGovern, Jr. (born August 11, 1937) is the chairman and founder of International Data Group (IDG), a company that includes subsidiaries in technology publishing, research and event management. He is a trustee of MIT, and on the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans, where he was ranked 64th in 2007, with a net worth of $4.7 billion. 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 photographic 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. [1] For a time, he was an assistant 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. He has been divorced once, has four children, and lives in Hillsborough, CA and Hollis, NH. He and his second wife Lore Harp gave MIT $350 million to found the McGovern Institute for Brain Research.
