Nobel Prize for Hard Drive Pioneers

As has been widely reported in the media, the two scientists responsible for pioneering the Giant Magneto-Resistive head technology that is used to read data back from modern hard drives were honored with the Nobel Prize for Physics yesterday.

I say “modern” hard drive because basic drive technology has been around since the mid-1950s, when it was developed at IBM. But it wasn’t until the advent of GMR in the late 1980s that the soaring data capacities we take for granted today began their upward climb. (Hard drive storage capacity, in fact, routinely increases at a rate that exceeds Moore’s law for micro-processors.)

Why is this significant to me? Because I write about hard drives in some detail in my forthcoming Mechanisms. (I also have an article online called “Extreme Inscription” [PDF].) The key point I attempt to make is probably this:

[S]tudents of new media [. . .] tend to ascribe “interactivity” to the advent of the screen display, the graphical user interface, and the mouse in a genealogy that runs from the SAGE air defense network through Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad to Douglas Englebart’s 1968 “mother of all demos.” But the advent of random access disk storage goes to the heart of contemporary critical assumptions about new media. . . . [C]omputers could not have expanded in their role from war-time calculators to new media databases without the introduction of a non-volatile, large-volume, inexpensive technology that afforded operators near instantaneous access to stored records. Magnetic disk media, more specifically the hard disk drive, was to become that technology and, as much as bitmapped-GUIs and the mouse, usher in a new era of interactive, real-time computing.

So it’s nice to see contributions to a normally invisible technology—the hard drive is literally a black box, sequestered inside of our computer’s external casing to protect it from dust and other contaminants—recognized, and I hope people enjoy learning something about hard drives as much as I did. They are fascinating machines, exquisitely blending analog and digital functions, and both macro- and nano-scale physics in a desktop technology we all take for granted.