One way he tries to illustrate the importance of modern storage systems to school children for whom technology is ubiquitous is to ask them a random question, such as "What's the height of the Hoover Dam?" When the kids all jump on a nearby computer to search for the answer, he then asks them where the information came from.

"They just stare. It's a total blank," he said. "That's the frustration when you worked on something to make that possible, but you're not even recognized. Most people just want to see a 3D movie, they don't much want to know what made it possible."

What helped make today's high-tech systems possible was hardware like the RAMAC. (The name stands for Random Access Method of Accounting and Control). It was nothing short of a technological miracle, and IBM even described its massive storage system as "miracle memory." The genius behind the storage medium was the fact that it exploited a rotating disk stack, which allowed read/write heads to cut seek times dramatically from those of tape storage devices or magnetic drum storage, which only allowed data to be read from the outside of a spinning cylinder.

took up the better part of a room and could store all of 5MB of data -- the equivalent of 64,000 punch cards or 2,000 pages of text with 2,500 characters per page. The drive system had an input/output data rate of roughly 10 kilobytes per second.