Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic storage, made of a thin, magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic film. It was developed in Germany in 1928, based on magnetic wire recording. Devices that record and playback audio and video using magnetic tape are tape recorders and video tape recorders respectively. A device that stores computer data on magnetic tape is known as a tape drive.
Ampex is an American electronics company founded in 1944 by Alexander M. Poniatoff as a spin-off of Dalmo-Victor. The name AMPEX is a portmanteau, created by its founder, which stands for Alexander M. Poniatoff Excellence. Today, Ampex operates as Ampex Data Systems Corporation, a subsidiary of Delta Information Systems, and consists of two business units. The Silicon Valley unit, known internally as Ampex Data Systems (ADS), manufactures digital data storage systems capable of functioning in harsh environments. The Colorado Springs, Colorado unit, referred to as Ampex Intelligent Systems (AIS), serves as a laboratory and hub for the company's line of industrial control systems, cyber security products and services and its artificial intelligence/machine learning technology.
GlassBridge Enterprises, Inc., formerly Imation Corporation, is an American holding company. Through its subsidiary, Glassbridge focuses primarily on investment and asset management. Prior to the name change, Glassbridge had three core elements: traditional storage, secure and scalable storage and what the company calls "audio and video information" products.
In computing, mass storage refers to the storage of large amounts of data in a persisting and machine-readable fashion. In general, the term is used as large in relation to contemporaneous hard disk drives, but it has been used large in relation to primary memory as for example with floppy disks on personal computers.
Memorex Corp. began as a computer tape producer and expanded to become both a consumer media supplier and a major IBM plug compatible peripheral supplier. It was broken up and ceased to exist after 1996 other than as a consumer electronics brand specializing in disk recordable media for CD and DVD drives, flash memory, computer accessories and other electronics.
Alan Field Shugart was an American engineer, entrepreneur and business executive whose career defined the modern computer disk drive industry.
The Massbus is a high-performance computer input/output bus designed in the 1970s by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). The architecture development was sponsored by Gordon Bell and John Levy was the principal architect.
In 1953, IBM recognized the immediate application for what it termed a "Random Access File" having high capacity and rapid random access at a relatively low cost. After considering technologies such as wire matrices, rod arrays, drums, drum arrays, etc., the engineers at IBM's San Jose California laboratory invented the hard disk drive. The disk drive created a new level in the computer data hierarchy, then termed Random Access Storage but today known as secondary storage, less expensive and slower than main memory but faster and more expensive than tape drives.
International Business Machines (IBM), nicknamed "Big Blue", is a multinational computer technology and IT consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM originated from the unification of several companies that worked to automate routine business transactions, including the first companies to build punched card based data tabulating machines and to build time clocks. In 1911, these companies were amalgamated into the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR).
CMX Editing Systems was a company founded jointly by CBS and Memorex; with help from many individuals such as Ronald Lee Martin, who later became a head of Universal Studios; that developed some of the very first computerized systems for linear and non-linear editing of videotape for post production. The company's name, CMX, stood for CBS, Memorex, and eXperimental.
Graham Magnetics, Inc. was chartered as Datatape, Inc. in 1964. By 1966, it had opened its new magnetic tape factory in Graham, TX and changed its name to Graham Magnetics. Until the 1980s, Graham's primary product was half-inch, open-reel magnetic tape. Graham was the last manufacturer of open-reel 9 track tape, but ceased production at the end of 2001. Currently, as of 2007, Graham Magnetics buys used tape cartridges and reconditions them for reuse.
Priam Corporation was a company located in San Jose, California, founded in 1978 by William Schroeder and Al Wilson, two former Memorex executives, as a manufacturer of hard disk drives. Originally, they made high-capacity 14-inch drives, developed for mainframe computers, available for minicomputers and high-end workstations, but switched to 8-inch disk drives in 1980.
A floppy disk is a disk storage medium composed of a disk of thin and flexible magnetic storage medium encased in a rectangular plastic carrier. It is read and written using a floppy disk drive (FDD). Floppy disks were an almost universal data format from the 1970s into the 1990s, used for primary data storage as well as for backup and data transfers between computers.
Sirjang Lal Tandon also known as "Jugi" Tandon, was born in India c. 1942. He is chairman and CEO of Celetronix, Inc. He is known for leading his company, Tandon Corporation in the disk drive industry, creating what became the industry-standard double-sided floppy drive disk read-and-write heads.
Tallgrass Technologies Corporation was the first manufacturer to offer a hard disk drive product for the IBM PC. Tallgrass was a Kansas City based microcomputer hardware and software company founded in December 1980 by David M. Allen. The hard disk drive product was initially sold in Computerland stores, alongside the original IBM PC. Tallgrass added tape-backup systems to its product line in 1982.
John Mason "Jack" Harker was an inventor, mechanical engineer, and product and program manager who pioneered development of disk storage systems. Starting as a member of the original team that developed the first disk storage system, he went on to develop IBM Direct Access Storage products for the next 35 years. Over that time, Harker was twice director of the IBM San Jose Storage Laboratories, an IBM Fellow, and an IEEE Fellow. He retired from IBM in 1987 and died in 2013.
Information Control Systems was a computer programming and data processing company serving clients in the Midwestern United States.
Terry Johnson was an engineer and entrepreneur notable for his pioneering work on hard disk drives (HDD). Johnson's early career included engineering and management roles in magnetic recording at IBM (1964–70) and Memorex (1971–73). He then joined in the development of STC 8000 Super Disk, a high-end, rotary actuator HDD funded by StorageTek.
James (Jim) U. Lemke was an American physicist and entrepreneur who lived in San Diego. He developed magnetic recording and internal combustion engine technologies.
