Kilpatrick's Biography

RON KILPATRICK

Well Good Morning, and thank you Father Locatelli for inviting me to be here today to open this session. You know it is my pleasure to welcome all of you and to really thank you for taking the time to be with us this morning. It is great to see so many key figures in our business together in one place. You know many of us in this room meet on a daily basis in the competitive playing field but on occasions like this we can celebrate what we have in common what we have accomplished as a industry.  Further we appreciate your personal leadership and that of Santa Clara University in staging this symposium.  Santa Clara's Institute for Information Storage Technology plays an important role in our industry and it will certainly have its chapter as we chronicle the history of magnetic recording.  When I received the invitation to speak today I was really excited for a couple reasons.  You see I have never been invited to speak at a 100th anniversary celebration before.  For someone in high tech a hundred years is like an archeologist going back to review the cretaceous period.  There was another reason that I wanted to be here also; I thought that as a speaker that I could use my clout to influence the agenda.  You see there is a topic on the agenda that I would rather not have there. It is entitled “when storage is free”, and of all things, it is one of my own guys who is making that presentation.  Why do we want something like that on the agenda?  It is tough enough with forty and fifty- percent price declines in our industry already effecting our businesses.  Free would be just awful.  On the other hand I think that the factories would be running at full capacity.
For now lets focus on today's celebration.  It is really hard to believe that magnetic recording has been around for a full century.  Think of the lineage of the tape recorder, the Walkman, the videocassette recorder and of course something very close to all of us the hard disk drive.  Magnetic recording has become an integral part of our lives but we tend to think of it as a more recent innovation than that other development that is near and dear to Silicon Valley the microprocessor.  It turns out to be a relative youngster compared to magnetic storage.  The microprocessor still has three more years to go before it celebrates its thirtieth anniversary.  For magnetic storage this certainly has been an eventful first century.
Recently I had a chance to see where it all began courtesy of, guess what?  - a magnetic recording on videotape.  We are about to launch the highest capacity desktop drive in the industry, and as part of that announcement we wanted to provided television stations with some footage that paid tribute to the underlying technologies that made these drives possible.  We sent a camera crew to a museum in Denmark to film Valdemar Poulsen’s 1898 creation, the telegraphone.  We got to hear the recorded voice of the Austrian Emperor as he marveled at this new creation.
Now the rolling stones maybe getting on in years and it has been a long time since their first recording, but we think the Austrian Emperor is still believed to be the oldest surviving recording in those few words stored on magnetic wire on a revolving drum.  The stage was set for many innovations to come innovations that changed our lives forever.
But like many advances in technology, war and convenience, were the mother of invention.  So it was that magnetic recording during World War I Poulsen’s telegraphone was used on German submarines to transmit coded messages, and later in World War II the magnetophone, a predecessor to the modern tape recorder, provided a real challenge to that allied signal corp.
How could that same voice be heard in so many places at the same time? Well after World War II the answer to that question was brought back to U.S. By returning service men and by chance one of them demonstrated this early tape recorder to singer Bing Crosby.  He became a fan and an investor as well.  He hated the regimen of live broadcast and the limits that put on his schedule not to mention all of the tea times he was missing at Pebble Beach.  He knew a good thing when he heard it, with Bing Crosby providing the venture capital the new technology gained some important support.  From there magnetic recording moved from the commercial to the consumer route.  With audio and videotape transforming our ideas about entertainment, whole new industries in audio, video, and computer media were created.  Blockbuster Video and Tower Records are just two retail giants that owe their existence to this technology.  Standards wars were fought between beta max and VHS, and like all battles there were winners and losers.  How many of you still have eight track tapes? If you do it is probably because you could not get rid of them at your last garage sale.
In 1956 something happened at the place where I work that’s close to all of us here - the invention of the hard disk drive.  This heralded the second era of technology.  We are here to celebrate today the era most familiar with each of us in this room, and we are all indebted to one man who had a vision.  A man who applied the principals of magnetic recording in a radical way and ushered in a whole new era in data storage.  His name was Rey Johnson, and he passed away this summer.  Since then I have had a lot of time to think about his contribution both to IBM and the whole disk drive industry.
In 1956 the principals of magnetic storage were already fifty-eight years old yet nothing about Rey's accomplishment was stale or dated.  Everyday I pass by the RAMAC as I walk through our lobby, the Random Access Method of Accounting Control.  It weighed over a ton.  It had over 24-inch disk drives it had a motor that was about this big, and also stored a whopping one-megabyte.  The magnetic coding was poured on to the disk from a paper cup and strained through a women’s stocking.  Now this sounds low tech today, but it had a high tech impact.  Ray's invention became the foundation upon which we built and continue to build the whole industry.  Wouldn't Ray be proud of what we have been able to do with his invention over the last forty-two years.  As that old commercial used to say, “we have come a long way baby”.
First of all I can't reveal IBM's trade secrets but I can tell you that we are now using much better cups and stockings today, and here is the result.  It’s the Microfile.  Its about one inch big, its disks are about the size of a quarter, it weighs less than a double A battery, and it stores a whopping 340 megabytes of storage.  And pretty soon a gigabyte or maybe two.
Well developments like this have moved the disk drive industry from PC's to Servers to the world of pervasive computing.  It helps to provide the base for another century of magnetic recording.  At IBM we talk a lot about pervasive computing, our vision of the universal access to data information wherever and whenever we need it, and that vision is coming very close to reality.  The explosive growth of the Internet is fueling the move to pervasive computing.  We will see entirely new applications of information technology as a web-enabled population grows.  By the year 2000, 60 percent of the household's in the U.S. Will have PCs.  The number of people with Internet access is predicted to 550 million by the year 2000.  Currently there is 625 terabytes of data accessed each month on the web.  By the year 2000 that will grow to six exabytes of data, that is ten thousand times more information.
That is going to require an awful lot of storage.  Not only that, we will see totally new ways of accessing all of this through information appliances.  The appliances that we have will become a lot smarter.  We will see microprocessors in everything.  Up to 20 or 30 imbedded controllers in our homes, even in our kitchen appliances.  Many of them will be linked directly to the web.  Imagine a refrigerator that automatically places an order to the grocery store when it realizes we are running low on a certain item, or a air conditioner that calls a repairman when it realizes that it is not cooling the house efficiently.  Where you find all of this processing power, you’ll find storage.  Perhaps that refrigerator will store its data on a Microdrive like this one, which we could take to the store with us, insert in a reader and collect our groceries.
What else does the future hold, what about the challenges that we face as we enter the next era of magnetic recording?  Just as Ray Johnson was able to take a 58-year-old technology and create a whole new industry the challenge for us is to continue to explore the principals of magnetic recording and take them to new limits.
Now my colleague John Best, from the IBM's Almaden Research Center, will speak to you later about pushing the limits, and he should know, his teams are the leading experts in increasing areal density and Giant MR Heads and many of the other fundamental storage technologies.  There is a lot of talk about the demise of magnetic recording due to the super paramagnetic limit, that point where we reach such high areal densities that the media becomes unstable.  Rest assured that the current technology has a long way to go before these limits are reached or even approached. In fact it is estimated that we will be able to achieve areal densities of 20 to 50 times greater than we have today.  That’s 20 to 50 times, and researchers are working on more than that.  John will tell you how industry ingenuity and creativity will give us the technology to take storage to the next level.  They always have.  It may be called Silicon Valley in homage to the microprocessor, but the heritage of the disk drive in this region is just as strong and just as important.  The ongoing research and development work in this valley continues to fuel this striving, often demanding, and very vibrant industry.
Analysts are certainly bullish on the disk drive industry.  This year 140 million hard disk drives will be shipped.  That grows to 160 million next year.  HDD's themselves make up about half of this years 48 billion dollar total revenue opportunity of storage devices.  Now I should note that these financial estimates assume that people are paying for these drives, and we’re not on that “free storage” kick.  But whether it is free or we pay for it, the business opportunity continues to grow, because of the need for storage continues to grow.  Many of the business applications that we take for granted wouldn't be possible without access to reliable affordable data storage.  We hear everyday we are in the information age, we are an information society.  While accessing and using information can't be separated from storage of information, the role of e-business that is now upon us, all the internet based activities and applications like business intelligence and data mining are storage dependent activities.  To keep the momentum going we need continuous innovation in all aspects of our business.  We must all encourage and support our research and development and manufacturing teams if we are to keep driving this industry forward.
On one of the notes that came from the Institute about this seminar I saw the phrase beyond stone tablets and Gütenburg, and I liked that reference to what we have accomplished in data storage. I believe it is as important development to our society as those revolutionary stages in history.  If you could take only one thing away today from this meeting, I want you to remember just how important Valdemar Poulsen’s discovery was and still is today, and realize that the work we have done in the hard disk drive industry is important, and what we will do is important make no mistake about that.  What we have been able to accomplish with the technology has improved our society and will continue to do so.
But technology is only as good as the people behind it.  Through your sponsorship and fellowships Santa Clara University provided engineering talent that can help us in this third era of Magnetic Storage and the Institute offerings, like the Arrowhead technical exchange, have become a important forum for high level information sharing.  This partnership between industry and academia continues to bind us together in a common goal.  The university mandate is to produce high caliber graduates, and it is my mandate and that of many in this room to give those graduates a canvas to express their talents, an environment that nurtures their creativity and research and development.  I am proud to help kick off today’s event.  Perhaps today in this room a spark will be ignited that flash of creativity that helps us to the next step in Magnetic Recording.  Rest assured the sun has just begun to rise on magnetic data recording.  Thank you and enjoy the day.