Jack Harker

Jack Harker
Born	John Mason Harker (1926-06-29) 29 June 1926 San Francisco, California, U.S.
Died	27 April 2013(2013-04-27) (aged 86)
Occupation(s)	Inventor, mechanical engineer, product manager
Years active	1952–1987
Known for	Development of disk storage technology at IBM

John Mason "Jack" Harker (June 29, 1926 – April 27, 2013) was a distinguished inventor, mechanical engineer, and product manager recognized for his pioneering contributions to the development of disk storage technology. As a member of the initial team responsible for the first disk storage system, he dedicated 35 years to advancing IBM Direct Access Storage solutions. Harker held the position of director at IBM San Jose Storage Laboratories twice, earned the title of IBM Fellow, and was honored as an IEEE Fellow. He retired in 1987 and passed away in 2013.

Early years

Harker was born in San Francisco in 1926 and served as a navy electronics repair specialist during World War II. He completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in mechanical engineering at Swarthmore College in 1950, followed by a master's degree from the University of California Berkeley in 1952, and later obtained a second master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1962.

IBM career

Rising through IBM’s ranks, Harker became the Director of the San Jose Laboratory in 1972. Although he is most noted for leading the IBM 1311 Disk File initiative, he personally regarded his work on the 1350/1360 (Cypress) Image Storage System as his most demanding project and viewed founding the Technology and Advanced Development Group (TAD) in 1969 as a significant milestone.

Upon completing his studies at Berkeley, Harker joined IBM’s San Jose design laboratory in 1952 as its eighteenth employee under the leadership of Reynold B. Johnson. His early role involved mechanical engineering work on the IBM 350 RAMAC, which was the first-ever hard disk drive.

Later, Harker teamed up with Alan Shugart on the IBM 1301 project, where he led efforts to develop the first self-flying disk heads. In his capacity as Air Bearing Development Manager, he engineered self-acting air bearings that enabled disk heads to hover over disks by utilizing airflow generated by the spinning disk itself instead of relying on compressed air—an innovation that remains vital to contemporary hard drive technology.

He served as engineering manager for the IBM 1311 project, overseeing development of the first commercially successful removable disk drive and contributing to the invention of the removable disk pack.

Between 1960 and 1969, Harker held positions as engineering manager and later Program Manager for the IBM 1350 Photo Image Retrieval System and IBM 1360 Photo-Digital Storage System—recognized as the inaugural "trillion-bit" storage system (~160 GB) created for the Atomic Energy Commission.

From 1969 to 1972, acting as Direct Access Storage Product Manager, he supervised IBM’s most lucrative product line of that era and laid foundational work for “Winchester” magnetic recording components alongside thin film recording technologies.

As Director of the San Jose Development Laboratory starting in 1972, Harker guided development of several critical storage innovations such as:

• The 2305 fixed-head drives and 3330 disk pack drives that combined ferrite head-slider units with microcodable systems using flexible media—forming the technological basis for the first floppy disk (IBM 23FD)
• The IBM 3850 Mass Storage System (MSS), one of the earliest automated tape libraries
• The IBM 3340 “Winchester” disk drive
• Thin film disk head technology

Harker subsequently held the role of Director of Technology at IBM before returning once more to lead San Jose Laboratories until his retirement in 1987.

Honors

• Harker was named an IBM Fellow in 1974.
• In 1993, he was honored with the inaugural IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Systems Award in recognition of his pioneering leadership in developing information storage technology.

Further reading

• A Quarter Century of Disk File Innovation: IBM Journal of Research and Development, 1981
• "History of Magnetic Disk Storage Based on Perpendicular Magnetic Recording," A. Hoagland, IEEE Trans Mag, July 2003
• "IBM's Early Computers," Bashe et al., The MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1986
• Creating Magnetic Disk Storage at IBM: Engineering and Technology History Wiki, 2015

External links

• Jack Harker at IBM’s 100th Century Dinner
• Interview with Jack Harker conducted by Hu Yoshida in 2007
• Early IBM film documenting the founding of IBM San Jose Labs and RAMAC
• 1968 IBM production on Magnetic Disk Pack manufacturing