Jack Kuehler, an electrical engineer who became the highest-ranking technologist at IBM and guided strategy as president and later vice chairman while the company dominated the world’s computing landscape in the 1980s, died Dec. 20 in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif. He was 76.

The cause was Parkinson’s disease, said his wife, Carmen Kuehler.

Kuehler, who was revered by the company’s engineering rank and file, stood out in a company that was defined by its blue-suited sales force. Confronting the rise of the microprocessor-based personal computer, Kuehler guided IBM into the open-standards PC workstation business. The resulting computing platform would become the basis for a system that remains the foundation of the company’s designs to this day.

Competition

Kuehler was the architect of a series of alliances for IBM, shoring up American technology competitiveness and restoring his company’s position in the industry as it found itself increasingly under attack from competitors.

He was instrumental in an investment that IBM made in the chip maker Intel when that company was struggling because of the rise of Japanese memory chip manufacturers. He led IBM into a partnership with Hitachi, once one of its most tenacious rivals. He also played a central role in the creation of Sematech, an industry-government alliance created in 1987 to help save the American semiconductor industry.

Later, as Microsoft and Intel became dominant forces in the personal computing world, Kuehler helped shape a partnership with Apple and Motorola in an effort to create a desktop competitor based on combining IBM hardware and Apple’s software expertise. The resulting PowerPC microprocessor became the basis for Apple’s computers from 1994 to 2006.

Kuehler represented an engineering culture that made IBM a technology powerhouse for more than three decades at the height of its dominance in mainframe computing.

“He was the best of class of a generation of computer engineers in the mainframe era,” said Andrew Grove, former chief executive and chairman of Intel. “He was scrupulously straight and passionately competitive.”