'Future Forward' Examines A Tech Titan You May Never Have Heard Of
International Data Group, IDG, is known as one of the most influential media empires in the world, but was started out of MIT graduate Patrick McGovern’s house in Newton in 1964. Author Glenn Rifkin, who worked for McGovern as an editor at Computer World in the 1980s, examines his late boss’s legacy in his new book, “Future Forward.”
Here & Now‘s Jeremy Hobson speaks with Rifkin (@glennrifkin) about the book.
Interview Highlights
On who Patrick McGovern was
“He was the entrepreneur and visionary who started a company called International Data Group, IDG. And what he saw was that the information technology revolution was getting started in the early ’60s, it was slow and steady. But he saw something bigger happening, and over those years he decided that somebody needed to tell the story of this revolution. It was one thing to be the Bill Gates or the Thomas Watson Jr., who made things — the software and the hardware. But somebody needed to chronicle what was going on, and that was his mission.
“He created actually nearly 300 publications around the world over the course of 50 years running the company. The first publication was Computerworld, which became the Bible of the information technology industry. … It was news, weekly news, it was product reviews and things like that, but
