RomankivLyubomyr

In 2019 the world started selling giant twenty-TB (terabyte) hard drives from Western Digital. You can upload about five million photos, or a million books, or five or seven thousand movies to one such disc. And all of this is on a disk measuring ten by fifteen centimeters and a little more than two and a half centimeters thick. Surprising. But not as much as those who have seen the IBM 305 RAMAC. Its hard drive was as tall as a man, a meter and a half wide and 74 centimeters deep and weighed almost a ton. The day after its presentation, the American newspaper “San Jose Mercury News” published an article entitled “Machine with Supermemory!”. It was a hard drive with a capacity of... 5 Mb. It was 1956, and the IBM 305 RAMAC was the first serial computer with magnetic memory. Among other things, it was so expensive that it was rented for $3,200 a month. In terms of 2021 — for $31,670 per month.

How did it happen that the disk, which seventy years ago was the size of a refrigerator, now fits in the palm of your hand? And the computer that used to occupy the whole room can now be thrown into a backpack and be taken with you to a cafe, mountain or sea.

In 1962, Lyubomyr Romankiv came to work for the American electronic corporation IBM. Then IBM was not only looking for ways how to make hard drives smaller and cheaper. A Ukrainian engineer joined the company to solve this problem. Education helped him to find this solution. After moving to Canada during World War II, Romankiv entered a university and achieved a bachelor’s degree from one of the best institutions, the University of Alberta, and then a Ph. D in metallurgy and materials science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. So, he was well keen on chemical engineering, electrochemistry and metallurgy at the same time. It was this combination of knowledge and skills that his competitors lacked of.

Together with his colleague David A. Thompson of the IBM Research Center, he invented the magnetic thin-film head for recording and reading information. The head magnetized small particles of disks covered with magnetic paint. And then it could read how and where it was magnetized, turn it into an electrical signal and transmit it to a computer. This made it possible to increase the density of information recording and significantly reduce the size of the hard disk. And as a result, the cost of data storage has been dramatically reduced. For ordinary computer users, Romankiv often explains the essence of this invention: “Press the ’Start‘ button on the keyboard, you will see a picture on the screen — it means that my magnetic head on the hard drive is already working”.

Modern hard drive inside

On October 18, 1979, Romankov and Thompson applied for a patent. Today it is known under the number4295173. This discovery, as well as two others that each of them has made on their own on the way to common, just turned the hard drive into the form which we know now. And the development of the Internet and cloud services now allows you to access a variety of information or data stored on hard drives in huge data centers.

In 2012, the name of Lyubomyr Romankiv was inducted into the National Hall of Fame of US inventors.

Interestingly, as soon as new hard drives went on sale, Steve Wozniak bought them for a small garage startup... Everyone knows what happened then.