Artifact Details

Title

Shiraishi, Fumitake oral history

Catalog Number

102740541

Type

Document

Description

Fumitake Shiraishi was a longtime drive designer for Toshiba HDD business, who is credited with designing many of Toshiba’s successful lines of small form factor drives. In particular, he played a leading role in the development of the drives using glass media, first introduced in 1991, which propelled Toshiba to become the dominant player in the 2 ½-inch drive market for a considerable amount of time. Shiraishi obtained a Mechanical Engineering degree from Kyoto University and entered Toshiba in 1966 in their Electronic Computer Division. He initially worked on tape drive development, but quickly joined the HDD development group at Toshiba starting in 1967, and he worked continuously in the HDD development until his retirement from the company in 1996. He was involved in large 14-inch IBM compatible HDD development initially, and went on to be involved in all subsequent HDD development at Toshiba, contributing to over 40 products during his illustrious career.

In 1998, Shiraishi joined Hoya Corporation, and served as the General Manager of their Glass Media business until 2002. After that, he continued to work for Hoya Corporation as their Staff Senior Technologist to support the glass media business until his retirement in 2007.

The interview was originally conducted in Japanese

Date

2019-10-09

Contributor

Shiraishi, Fumitake, Interviewee

Suzuki, Isao, Interviewer

Yamashita, Tom, Interviewer

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Place of Publication

Tokyo, Japan

Extent

21 p.

Format

PDF

Subject

Toshiba Corporation; Mobile HDD; mobile drive; Hoya glass media; Nidec motor; notebook computer; Yamaha recording heads

Collection Title

CHM Oral History Collection

Credit