Al Hoagland, then a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, was one of the 18 or so people in the mid-1950s working for IBM in San Jose on the Random Access Method for Accounting Control, or RAMAC. IBM had started the facility there to take advantage of aerospace professionals in Seattle and Los Angeles who didn't want to move to the East Coast, he said. Because of the distance, lab head Rey Johnson had a free hand, Hoagland said.

Porter remembers that the computer room where the RAMAC was stored was three levels below Market Street. He said the disk system's head assembly moved "in and out and all over, and [had] a glass front so you could see what was going on."

By chance, after Porter left Crown Zellerbach in 1964, he went to work for other companies that were taking advantage of storage technology, including Memorex Products Inc. and Cartridge Television Inc., which made Cartrivision, the first VCR. "Movie moguls would say, 'Rent a movie? Are you out of your mind?'" he says. Zellerbach then moved on to CMX, a joint venture of CBS Corp. and Memorex, to develop a video editing system for US$360,000 that was used by the CBS and NBC evening news. "Today, you can do everything CMX could do for $1,000 on a Macintosh," he said.

In the meantime, the storage industry itself was booming with more than 200 companies, many of them in what had then become known as Silicon Valley. Vendors were doubling the areal density -- the number of bits per square inch on the disk -- every year. Capacity was going up, size was shrinking, and prices were going down, from the 24-in. platters used in the RAMAC Disk Storage Unit to 14 in. to 8 in.

At that point, Porter said, Wang Laboratories Inc. came up with the revolutionary notion of putting a computer on top of the desk. But it thought 8-in. floppy drives were too big for that. So engineers from leading drive manufacturer Shugart & Associates met with Wang engineers in a dark bar in Boston and decided the next disk drive size should be 5 ' in. -- the size of a cocktail napkin. "Those became sacred dimensions for the next 10 years," Porter said, referring to the fact that Seagate Technology used those same dimensions for PC disk drives.