Al Hoagland

Albert Smiley Hoagland, known as Al Hoagland (1926 to 2022), spent his career on magnetic data storage and the development of the hard disk drive. He was born in Berkeley, California, earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and went on to a master's degree and a doctorate there under Paul Morton, taking responsibility for the magnetic drum memory of the CALDIC computer project. He consulted on IBM's RAMAC disk drive from 1953 and joined the IBM San Jose laboratory in 1956, shortly before the RAMAC was announced, where he contributed to head, media and data-detection design and did early studies of track-following servo and perpendicular recording. He wrote the first book on digital magnetic recording, published in 1963. From 1984 to 2005 he directed the Institute for Information Storage Technology at Santa Clara University, and he helped preserve and restore the IBM RAMAC now displayed at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.