Title
Warner, Mike oral history
Catalog Number
102738849
Type
Moving image
Description
The bay area is famous as the “Silicon Valley” source of semiconductor electronics, but disk drives were also created here and all computers now have one or more. Server farms operated by Google, Amazon and others have tens of thousands disk drives operating 24/7 to power the internet vast data base. The original RAMAC from IBM San Jose in 1956 was the size of a refrigerator and held about 5 megabytes, enough to store little more than a 3 minute song. In the following years size and cost dropped dramatically, from a little 1 inch diameter “Microdrive” to other models holding multiple terabyte (trillions) of data, all at affordable consumer prices One significant advantage was improved recording heads and disk media, moving from a heavily loaded 350 gram force on a hand-made metal head against a disk coated with magnetic paint to today’s nearly zero downward force of a tiny thin film head on a sputtered magnetic disk made of glass, both produced by semiconductor processes. The tiny and low mechanical force head were first used in a double disk drive of 30 megabytes each, so the technology was named “Winchester” after the famous 30-30 Winchester rifle. The mechanical head design was done by our oral history provider Mike Warner, and was lauded by legendary computer pioneer and executive Al Shugart as one of the most important disk drive inventions of all time. The following oral history represents the spirit and can-do attitude of technology pioneers who made Silicon Valley what it is today.
Date
2018-07-31
Participants
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Carlson, Bill, Interviewer
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Warner, Mike, Interviewee
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Publisher
Computer History Museum
Place of Publication
Mountain View, CA
Duration
02:39:04
Format
MOV
Category
Oral history
Collection Title
CHM Oral History Collection
Credit
Computer History Museum
