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DataDisc Contributions
DataDisc was started by Armin Miller in the mid 1960s. Miller had worked for Ampex where he created the "Miller Code," later rediscovered by IBM who referred to it as MFM recording. MFM was the name known most popularly by the disk drive industry.
DataDisc was a maverick in the disk drive busines eschewing oxide coated disks and slider bearing heads. The key ingredient of DataDisc's products were disks using metal plating as the recording film and a three-point, contact recording head of their own design and manufacture. My first exposure to DataDisc was a demonstration put on by someone (Miller?) at IBM. The demonstration unit was in a wooden box about 8-inches square and perhaps 4-inches high. It contained a plated disk and recording head that played a recorded signal on an oscilloscope. The most striking feature was the loud screeching sound made in operation. We at IBM considered it a joke and gave the concept no further attention at that time. Little did we know that there was great deal of the industry's future in that box!
DataDisc continued on as a company finding niche markets for their products. Livermore Labs used a fixed head DataDisc product in an early graphics display system. For whatever reasons, DataDisc became exclusively a head-per-track disk drive manufacturer mostly used as mass storage for DEC computer systems Miller left the company and was replaced by Bill O'Sullivan who added tape drives and controllers to the product line. O'Sullivan left in the mid-1970s and was relaced by Jim Woo (one of the infamous "Dirty Dozen".) Woo changed the company name to Amcomp and engineered the sale of the company to Datapoint in 1978.
Posted:
Apr 3 2008, 4:03 PM EDT by
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