JIM KOCH
On behalf of the Center for Science, Technology, and Society and the Institute for Storage Technology, I would like to thank our sponsors for today. In addition to IBM, they include Fujitsu Corporation, Adaptec, and IDEMA. My name is Jim Koch and I am the director of our Center for Science, Technology, and Society here at Santa Clara University. The mission of the Center is a bit different than that of the Institute for Information Storage Technology. Our efforts are focused on illuminating the dynamic interplay of science and technology with culture and society. The Center brings together scientists and engineers, innovators like many of you in this room, theoreticians, economists, and social scientists, as well as scholars in law and administrative sciences to understand basically three things. First of all, how can we continue to foster advances in science and technology and learn about the process of innovation and social diffusion from the lessons of the past? Secondly, what do these advances mean for how we live and work, for our everyday lives, and for the wider transformations of culture and society? And thirdly, how can we, through our own ingenuity, influence science and technology for the greater benefit of society or the common good?
The preparation
of today's program has been an exciting opportunity for me and
it has been a great honor to work with Al Hoagland. He has given
me all the hard duty in this project. I have got to tell you,
he put me in charge of audio-visual facilities, which I think
is unfair. He also gave me an even more onerous task-to keep us
reasonably on schedule today. Having reviewed some of the presentations
I have noticed some people have thirty minutes to talk and thirty-five
slides. I know it is going to be an interesting challenge because
as the day proceeds I think we want to make this an interactive
program. This is a gathering of friends and colleagues. Many of
you in this audience have been among those having a tremendously
influential role in shaping what has happened in this industry,
so we will want to preserve some time for question and answer.
At the end of the day we will have a panel with program participants
invited to join with me for an interactive dialogue with all of
you on what the future may hold. This is going to be a great seminar
today and I hope it will be an opportunity for some interaction.
I will see that it happens.
In many respects today is
a birthday party. It is a chance, as Paul Locatelli, S.J., mentioned,
to remember, to talk about, and to celebrate milestones and breakthroughs.
Just think, in 1855 it cost 5 cents to send one word from Philadelphia
to St. Louis-5 cents a word, and that was by Morse code of course.
Today, it costs less than 4 cents to store a million bytes of
information, and with a click of the mouse you can transmit that
information to any place in the world. The ability to record,
collect, store, manipulate, analyze and transmit information has
all been made possible by the advances in storage technology that
we will be discussing today. As we will see, this is an extremely
dynamic, global arena of scientific and technological change.
Without it the benefits of digital electronic computing, as we
know them today, would not have been possible. Neither would the
phenomenal impact of the Internet be possible.
In our journey today there
will be eleven stops. I'll serve as a "trip conductor"
and highlight the scope of the ground we will cover. We will be
hearing from economists, historians, scientists, engineers, and
senior executives. We will begin at our first stop, with an economic
perspective. Professor Alex Field will provide us with an economic
overview of some unanswered questions about information technology's
influence on aggregate productivity and standards of living. We
will then shift to a historic perspective by Finn Jorgenson, who
will examine the pioneering work of innovators during the first
fifty years of magnetic recording. Then we will journey to examine
the engineering and design innovations that have occurred during
the last fifty years with presentations by Al Hoagland and Juan
Rodriguez on magnetic disk recording and storage on tape, respectively.
Moving from the lens of the senior scientist, we will "helicopter
up" with Jim Porter and take a wide-angle view of this industry
from both a regional and global perspective. Jim will discuss
the global patterns of growth that we can expect in this industry
in the years ahead.
Following Mr. Porter, John
Best from IBM's Almaden Research Labs will come on before lunch
to explore important questions in the physics of storage, and
how long into the future can we expect the sixty- percent compound
growth rate in storage to continue. There is a lot of interesting
speculation on this question, and I am delighted John is with
us today to provide insight from one of America's foremost research
centers.
At lunchtime, Al Shugart will
be with us to provide his always provocative perspectives. He
has been part of this industry, as many of you know, for several
decades now. Al will share his thoughts and ideas regarding future
disk drive trends and some of the most significant factors to
have shaped the last quarter century.
This afternoon we will hear
from Larry Sanders, CEO and President of Fujitsu Computer Products
of America. We will also be hearing from Dave McKendrick at the
Information Storage Industry Center at the University of California
in San Diego. Like Mr. Sanders, he will discuss the economic and
global context of this industry. We couldn't have a session like
this today without including a discussion of the Internet. Eric
Brewer, University of California Berkeley Professor and co-founder
of Inktomi, will talk about the interplay of storage technology
with the Internet and how user needs will shape future market
demands for storage.
Finally, we will conclude
our day with a focus on "what the future will hold."
IBM Fellow, Dave Thompson, and Bill Davidow of Mohr, Davidow Venture
Partners will examine frontiers of technology from the perspective
of what this all means for how we will live and work differently
in the future. All in all, it promises to be an exciting and stimulating
day. Santa Clara University's Center for Science, Technology,
and Society is, indeed, pleased to co-host this program and to
celebrate the genius of so many pioneers in science and engineering.
They've forever changed the limits of what we can know and learn
through our ability to store, access, analyze and transmit information.