- André Truong Trong Thi
André Trương Trọng Thi (1936-2005) was a Vietnamese-French engineer. He is considered to be the "
father of the personal computer" for creating theMicral microcomputer based on anIntel 8008 processor in 1973.Biography
Trương Trọng Thi was born in 1936 in
Cholon (Saigon ). When he was 14 years old, he arrived in France to study, and later studied at the "École Française de Radioélectricité" (nowEFREI ). After working forSchlumberger andIntertechnique for some time, he formed the companyR2E ("Réalisation d'Études Électroniques").In 1973, with
François Gernelle and a team of engineers he created theMicral , the first non-kit, microprocessor basedpersonal computer in the world. It was created two years before theMITS Altair ofMicro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems arrived on the market. In 1981, R2E was absorbed byGroupe Bull . The Micral computers were turned into a line of PC-compatibles in 1983. André Truong Trong Thi resigned from Bull, and joined the companyNormerel formed by J. R. Tissot, a former member of R2E management. He developed the "Oplite" personal computer for Normerel. Normerel was in 1988 the third french computer maker afterGroupe Bull andSMT Goupil .In 1995, he formed
APCT , a software company specializing incryptography .In 1999, he was awarded the
Légion d'honneur .He died on
April 4 ,2005 in Paris after being hospitalized for two and a half years.External links
* [http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/1997/09/6850 A Talk with the Father of Computing] - Wired Magazine
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.