Tuesday, June 19, 2007

30 years of HDD development

The reason I and the other Rochester employees were sent to San Jose was to "steal" technology on building hard disk drives and to bring it back to Rochester. This was the time of the antitrust suit against IBM and there was a danger that the company would be split. Rochester, who built the AS/400, did not want to have to buy their disk drives from an outside source.

The product I worked on was one similar to this picture, but only capable of holding about 200M bytes of data. 30 years later, a drive holding 1000 times as much data can be held in the palm of your hand.

Ellyn must not have thought "Is that a hard drive in your pocket or are you just glad to meet me?" when we were first introduced by the secretary in our area. There is another archaic concept, the common secretary. They are now administrative assistants and only work for top management.