final book al hoagland - Archive Server - Computer History Museum

e new IBM products and one-half were to be devices in support of customer’s special
engineering needs. No projects were to be duplicates of work in progress in other IBM
laboratories. The laboratory was to be dedicated to innovation.
My first act as manager of the new laboratory was to rent a building, and the
second act was to place an ad in all West Coast daily papers, announcing that IBM was
opening a laboratory in San Jose. The ad noted that positions were available for
scientists, engineers and technicians, and it brought in 400 applications.
The IBM Research and Engineering Laboratory opened its doors at 99 Notre
Dame, a few blocks from here, on February 1, 1952.
I was told that my flair for innovative engineering was a major consideration in
my selection to manage the new laboratory. During 18 years with the IBM Endicott
laboratory, I had had responsibility for numerous IBM products -- test scoring, mark
sensing, time clock products, keypunches, matrix and non-impact printers and random
card file devices. By 1952, I held over 50 patents, some of them fairly good.
To be given freedom to choose our projects and our staff made the San Jose
laboratory an exciting opportunity, especially since funding was guaranteed -- at least
for a few years.
The first few months of 1952 were consumed largely in interviewing and hiring
a balanced staff of talented and experienced engineers, technicians and administrative
personnel.
Except for one person from each of our two New York laboratories, and one
engineer from my department in Endicott, New York, we were under orders not to
recruit people from the eastern sites of IBM. As a result, our first crew all came from
the West.
Among the first projects, undertaken during the start-up were a non-impact
printer, a test scoring machine, source recording equipment and a random access
replacement for tub 1 files.
It was the search for an automatic random access system to replace tub files
that led us to explore magnetic systems.
In 1952 IBM was producing sixteen billion Hollerith cards per year. Each of
these cards had to have information entered into it in the form of punched holes before
accounting machines could usefully process it. Manual keypunching was one of the
most costly items in customer data processing operations. In many applications, most
of the information in a card was unchanged from week to week. In a payroll
application, for example, only hours worked may be new. An automatic tub file would
automatically enter status information and the keypunch operator would be relieved of
punching anything but new data.
After deciding that our random access component was to be based on a
magnetic recording system, we proceeded to explore the most probable magnetic
media. We explored magnetic drums, magnetic tape loops, magnetic plates, magnetic
tape strip bins, and even magnetic wires and rods.
Rotating magnetic disks came out on top in our analysis, chiefly because of its
rotational dynamics, the potential of multiple accesses and the efficient surface-to-size
ratio.
As time went on, our engineers became inspired by the possibility of developing
a product that gave essentially instant access to file data, not only when connected to
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