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“Hard Drive!” is a Silicon Valley high-tech adventure documentary novel set during the rise of Seagate Technology, today’s leading maker of computer hard disc drives. My years at Seagate were such unexpected experiences I felt driven to tell their stories.
Craziness was commonplace in early Seagate for the company to survive, which its own people called a “cowboy company.” Impossible to capture in a simple documentary, this is a fictionalized novel of craziness, excitement, and tears as Seagate first thrived with its invention of the personal computer hard disc drive, nearly died, survived, and finally arrived dominant in drives. Every chapter is based on a true happening. Most have been dramatized.
It’s an adventure of a lifetime of a magnetics researcher turned design engineer, participating in the half-century of disk drive progress led by colorful and intriguing pioneers that took drives from a dream of Ada, Countess of Lovelace in Victorian England, to today’s drives that hold the world’s information and empower the Internet.
The book’s background reveals little known Silicon Valley startup company realities: the engineering “alligators” that arise in product manufacturing to devour sales and profits; the Silicon valley business competition model of simultaneous product design, sales and revenue; U.S. patent system shortcomings in protecting commodity electronics; fighting frivolous lawsuits; and U.S. tax policies that encourage employers to send manufacturing jobs to foreign lands, barely hinted at by U.S. government leaders.
It’s also about my years at Caltech when double-Nobel winner Linus Pauling and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman were professors; about global nuclear winter dangers from a forgotten missile fleet; and finding God through the scientific method.
More information at HardDriveTheNovel.com
The author has a PhD from Cal Tech and was made an IEEE Fellow for his part in developing the Grenex cobalt disc as described in the book.
He is married with two children, does disc drive research at the University of California in San Diego, and holds a multiengine instrument rated FAA pilot license
ASIN ‏ : ‎ B004LLIC86
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Booksurge (December 21, 2007)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ December 21, 2007
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 882 KB
Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 316 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 1419634615