final book al hoagland - Archive Server - Computer History Museum

on my way back home to California). It now seemed an appropriate time to review my
situation. An agreement was reached with Ralph Gomory, then Director of Research, that
I would spend nine months in Boulder, Colorado before returning to San Jose. Boulder
was where the IBM magnetic tape product development and manufacturing unit was
located. I would initiate and organize a joint Yorktown/Boulder “Benchmark” program to
demonstrate that much higher densities were still possible on magnetic tape, a product
category that was viewed as having a very long lifeline, at least for archival storage. At
this time, the computer industry was still completely dependent on low-cost magnetic
tape systems for off-line storage, a very competitive product area. There was no real
alternative technology for this purpose then foreseen. I accepted the Boulder assignment
with the understanding that Boulder would again be just a stopover on my way back to
California.
I arrived in Boulder in September of 1971. All IBM magnetic tape activities had been
consolidated at a relatively new IBM plant site in the area. I met with Max Femmer, in
charge of product development activities, and we agreed to start the benchmark program
by establishing a local task force to assess the limits of known engineering design
approaches. On the basis of our analysis and experimental studies the group became
convinced that tape storage density could be increased by a factor of 10 or more. An
engineering project would be undertaken to attempt to demonstrate the gains predicted.
However, in mid-decade IBM decided to relocate the entire IBM tape organization to
Tucson, Arizona. The move came at the cost of major attrition of engineering personnel
for whom leaving Boulder was unacceptable. IBM had decided to move the Office
Products Division (OPD) from Lexington, Kentucky to Boulder, as that Division needed
room to expand. In order to make it easier to convince OPD personnel to relocate, IBM
agreed to give this Division site responsibility for the Boulder facility. These changes
also triggered a major loss of personnel by the IBM tape division as many would not
relocate to Arizona. As for myself, I decided to exercise my option and return to the San
Jose research Laboratory, not nine months as originally planned, but after five years.
I relocated to San Jose in June of 1976 and rejoined the San Jose research Laboratory. I
was temporarily given the responsibility of setting up a small exploratory magnetic
recording group with a starting headcount that included only one professional beside
myself. Soon after I arrived my manager requested a meeting. He informed me that I
needed to consider changing into another career field since the San Jose laboratory had
recently made the decision not to continue working on magnetic recording but focus
instead on magnetic bubble technology.
A new department of about 20 or more research scientists had been hired to work on this
new technology. Magnetic bubble storage is based on creating small magnetic regions in
a continuous film and electronically controlling their movement to a location where they
could be accessed. It was expected that this technology would also be non-volatile (which
semiconductor memory was not), yet faster than magnetic disk devices and cost
competitive. The decision to discontinue work in magnetic recording was consistent with
the views at Yorktown and hardly surprised me even though the magnetic bubble project
still had not reached the product development stage and a new advanced disk drive
product (IBM 3380) was soon to be announced.
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