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DISK DRIVE CONTROL: THE EARLY YEARS
Daniel Abramovitch* and Gene Franklin**
* Aginlent Laboratories, Communications and Optics
Research Lab, 3500 Deer Creek Road, M/S: 25U-25U-9, Palo
Alto, CA 94304, Phone: (650) 485-3806, FAX: (650)
485-4080, E-mail: danny@labs.agilent.com
** Stanford University, Information Systems Lab, 252
Packard Electrical Engineering Building, 350 Serra Mall,
Stanford, CA 94305, Phone: (650) 723-4837, E-mail:
franklin@isl.stanford.edu
One of the persistently exciting control applications is that of disk drive servos. From the start in the early 1950s to the massive capacity commodity drives of the early 2000s, the problem of accessing data on rotating disk media has provided a wealth of control challenges to be solved. This survey paper traces the early history of disk drive control from the first disk drive in 1956 to the first commercial drive with Magneto-Resistive heads in 1990.
Keywords: Disk drive control, early history, servomechanisms, computer hardware
Session slot T-Th-M12: History of Control: 1955-1975/Area code 6a : Control Education
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