William Goddard

William A. Goddard (July 10, 1913 in St. Joseph, Missouri – September 29, 1997 in Chico, California) was an American engineer and inventor. He earned a degree in physics from Occidental College. Before working in industry, Goddard was a high school science teacher in Los Angeles. He briefly worked in the aerospace industry for North American Aviation, Inc. before becoming an engineer at International Business Machines (IBM). His most acclaimed achievement is co-inventing along with John Lynott United States Patent 3,503,060, which is entitled “Direct Access Magnetic Disc Storage Device”. This invention claims cover modern-day hard disk drives. Pre-IBM Goddard worked on wind tunnel work for North American Aviation. He was to work on similar wind tunnel innovations for a Los Angeles airplane manufacturer at IBM, but shortly after he was hired, the contract for that project was dropped. Goddard was instead hired as an engineer, and became involved in the magnetic storage disk project when the United States Air Force called upon IBM in order to be “mechanized”. The base required a mechanism to “store data” virtually for its operations, and from this necessity, the disk storage project was conceived. RAMAC Project at IBM William Goddard was a member of the San Jose, California–based engineering team that developed the 350 Disk Storage Unit, a major component of the IBM 305 RAMAC Computer. The magnetic disk drive represented a technological leap forward in rapid access to mass data storage, substantially faster than the then dominant tape drive. The CPU unit, also known as the 305 Processing unit, was responsible for the write-in and read-out operations of the IBM 350. “Instructions” were provided to the unit coded as “memory addresses”. These addresses referred to specific locations on the disc in which a transducer was either commanded to write-in or read-out data.