IBM100: Impressions from San Jose Research 1956 – 1984

A tin roofed former cannery building housed IBM’s Research Lab on Julian Street, downtown San Jose in 1956 when I first came to work: An oven in the summer and leaking here and there during the rainy season.

Based on the success of the just announced 5MB RAMAC, we were going to build a photo memory, with a million times the RAMAC capacity! The concept and proposed implementation had little merit, but we were young, enthusiastic and a bit naïve. Today, it is difficult to realize that in 1956, most graduating engineering and science majors had no idea of what a computer was let alone the function of storage. The “system” competence, which made the RAMAC such a game changing success, had moved to the Development Lab. And it would take some time for the research organization to fully understand its role in IBM.

But then, there was serendipity. The first organic chemists came to SJ Research to address the problems posed by the photo memory project. These same chemists subsequently advanced photolithography which contributed to IBM’s leadership in integrated circuit technology. And along with physical chemists and physicists, they made major contributions to magnetic recording technology. They helped transform “paint” poured from a paper cup onto a spinning disc into the thin film technology, which is the basis for today’s storage media.

I have looked back and wondered what made San Jose Research such a success. It seems that hiring the most promising graduates from the best universities must be the answer. One of my responsibilities at IBM was the “Post-Doc Program.” This program brought promising young scientists and engineers to the lab from many countries where IBM had a major presence. To the lab, this was a welcome augmentation of junior staff; to the post docs an opportunity to work in a leading research lab with some of the best in their respective field. The most significant thing the foreign post docs took with them was the notion that there is another way of doing things -- the essence of creativity.

Maybe another contributor to the labs accomplishment was the less heralded role of outstanding management. Project R, the basis for Relational Database technology, would not have come about without the leadership of Leonard Liu, who succeeded in bringing together the efforts of an exceptionally talented group of individuals and recognized a window of opportunity.

I also recall the time when the entire storage products line was threatened by unexplained disk crashes. Every relevant resource in research and development company-wide was enlisted to address this problem. Major organizations and governments worldwide had stored their vital information on disk-based storage products. It is one thing to encounter a problem, another not to understand its cause.

The solution to the problem was not one arrived at by reverse engineering. Heinrich Hunziger, a physical chemist in the San Jose Research Lab had spent his time at IBM perfecting an analytical method of detecting and analyzing microscopic quantities of organic matter on surfaces - nothing to do with magnetic recording technology. When he learned of the disk crash problem he felt his technique might help shed some light. He was able to identify an unsuspected organic material which had contaminated the surface, speculate upon and confirm its source, as well as provide the basis for a system preventing this impurity from reaching disk surfaces. Basic research comes to the aid of the current product line!

Upon retiring in 1984, all that I had learned in IBM Research in the course of 28 years helped me to establish ICSI, the International Computer Science Institute, at UC Berkeley, still going strong. Much of that experience found it’s way into a book published by Springer in 1990, Managing Creativity in Science and Hi-Tech and into a Second Edition to appear end of 2011.

The most important lessons from my IBM Research experience is that what matters most to creative people drawn to an industrial research lab is not basic vs. applied research, independent or team effort, but to realize their full potential in doing something that is relevant, hence appreciated and rewarded.

Contribution by Ronald Kay, SJ Research 1956 – 1984 with detour to Ad Tech in San Jose and Kingston, 1965-1967 and MIT, 1967-1968.