The Dal Allan collection holds documentation pertaining to mass storage and disk drives during the 1980s and 1990s. About half of the collection consists of conference proceedings from events such as the Data Storage Interface and Technology conference, the European Data Storage Interface and Technology conference, and the Storage, Interface and Communication conference. Other conferences include the Head/Media Technology Review, the Arrowhead III, and the Data Compression conferences. There are also a number of forum proceedings, including those of the SCSI, Fibre Channel, and RAID forums, as well as some conference paper digests. About a quarter of the collection consists of storage industry market studies and forecasts published between 1988 and 1992 by groups such as IDEMA, Technology Forums, International Data Corporation (IDC), and Peripheral Research Corporation. The last fourth of the collection is made up of printed materials related to data storage, including technical reports, specifications, manuals, clippings, promotional material, and issues of some magazines, such as Computer Technology Review, Mini-Micro Systems, Hard Copy, and Digital Design.
Biographical/Historical Note
Dal Allan is president of ENDL Consulting and specializes in peripheral interfaces, especially storage. Allan grew up in Australia and at the age of 19, went to work for International Business Machines (IBM) in 1960 while earning his bachelor's degree in Economics. He worked in the systems department, where he learned to program and became one of the four people who wrote the original disk operating system for the System 360. In 1969 he transferred to IBM in San Jose, California. He then left IBM and worked at Information Storage Systems (ISS) for much of the 1970s. Allan was very active in the disk drive industry, taking leadership roles in developing disk drive and storage interface standards. For example, he was involved in the development of SCSI and Fibre Channel standards. Allan was also on the Small Form Factor Committee, now known as the SFF Committee, which was formed in 1990 to develop interoperability specifications as a complement to the traditional standards committee process. In 1984, Allan started an organization called ENDL Inc., a consulting firm specializing in computer interfaces. For over twenty years, the company published a newsletter, ENDL Letter, to provide inside information on storage technology developments. Allan is a member of the Storage Special Interest Group committee at the Computer History Museum.
Level of description
Collection
Date
1970-1997, 1985-1995
Extent
10.3 linear feet in 9 record cartons and 1 periodical box
The ENDL Letter Happenings were an industry source for strategic guidance and insight into the past, present and future of storage standards and interfaces published from 1985 to December 2012. Each year of newsletters is bound in a "Library Edition." Library has:
1985: January-December
1986: January-December
1987: January-December
1988: January-December
1989: January-December
1990: January-December
1991: January-December
1992: January-December
1993: January-December
1994: January-December
1995: January-December
1996: January-December