In March 1981, he was appointed a vice president of the Information Systems Division and general manager of the IBM's Rochester, Minnesota, facility.
[2][3][4] In 1973, while an executive in General Systems Division, Lowe was instrumental in fostering an engineering prototype called SCAMP (Special Computer APL Machine Portable) created by Dr. Paul Friedl and a team at the IBM Los Gatos Scientific Center.
The engineering prototype and design model were utilized internally by Lowe in his early efforts to demonstrate the viability of creating a single-user computer.
[6] However CEO Frank Carey had begun to encourage the creation of small, autonomous "Independent Business Units" (IBU) within IBM, so therefore, rather than acquiring Atari, the corporate committee allowed Lowe to form a group of 12 employees and requested a strategy for developing the product internally.
The crude prototype they designed barely worked when Lowe demonstrated it to the committee in August, 1980 but he presented a detailed business plan that streamlined the development process by proposing an open architecture[7] as well as non-proprietary components and software.