Interviewed by Bill Carlson on 2018-07-31 in Mountain View, CA © Computer History Museum 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. * Note: Transcripts represent what was said in the interview. However, to enhance meaning or add clarification, interviewees have the opportunity to modify this text afterward. This may result in discrepancies between the transcript and the video. Please refer to the transcript for further information - http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102738848 Visit computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories/ for more information about the Computer History Museum's Oral History Collection. Catalog Number: 102738849 Lot Number: X8731.2019