Interviewed by Bruno Marchon on 2024-04-11 in Mountain View, CA
© Computer History Museum
The RAMAC was the very first disk drive ever made. It was invented, fabricated, and commercialized in San Jose by a team of fifty or so IBM engineers in the mid-1950s. It allowed for the first real-time record transactions of large data sets, enabling computerized banking, airline reservation, inventory management, and many other applications. This RAMAC was a great commercial success for IBM, and it spurred a multibillion-dollar hard disk-drive industry that is powering today’s internet and cloud storage. In 2001, Dr. Al Hoagland, then Electrical Engineering professor at Santa Clara University, and himself a former IBM RAMAC engineer, undertook an ambitious project to bring back to life one of the few still existing RAMACs. He lobbied IBM to procure one from their archives, and he put together a team of students and former IBM engineers. In less than ten years, the team was able to mechanically restore this RAMAC, read and decode all the still-existing data off the disks, build a controller and write the software to operate the read/write arm assembly and simulate read operations. This RAMAC has now been on display at the Computer History Museum for over 14 years, with weekly live demonstrations for the public to enjoy. In this interview panel are four of the key people that made this possible: Patrick Connolly, who was one of Dr. Hoagland’s former students, with David Bennet, John Best, and Joe Feng, all IBM retirees and former engineers who dedicated a lot of their time to this project.
- 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/102740447
Visit computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories/ for more information about the Computer History Museum’s Oral History Collection.
Collection number: 102740448
Acquisition number: 2024.0054
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