Hi Chris,
Happy New Year and thanks for the link to the article.
A few years back I had read a story in one of the professional journals where
it quoted the late Al Shugart, who had also worked on the 305 and eventually went
on to co-found and run a little company called Seagate, as describing the disk drive
business as the "toughest business in the world".
With the relentless push for higher and higher capacities in smaller form
factors but with higher rotational speeds at ever decreasing prices, it certainly
would be an incredibly tough business even today, despite the world's insatiable
demand for storage.
A couple of decades ago I remember the group I was with having parting drinks
at the pub for a co-worker who was heading off to Colorado Springs to join
a start-up called Ramtron. There were high hopes that F-RAM would bring
an end to hard drives, but we are still waiting.
And before that there was Bubble Memory. I remember Intel, among others, ploughed
an enormous amount of time and money into it. I got to use one on an Intel
development system for a processor they spent even more money on called the
iAPX-432, a 32-bit processor that was meant to succeed the 8080, but that
is another story.
The only recollections of these are now stored in biological memory.
.
.
you know the one George always was fighting with
