Reynold B. Johnson

Reynold Johnson was born in 1906 in Minnesota and became one of the most prolific inventors at IBM, specializing in electromechanical devices. After earning a bachelor of science degree in education administration at the University of Minnesota in 1929 he taught science and math at a local high school, until in 1933 he lost his teaching job and began developing an electromechanical device for automatically grading pencil-marked multiple choice tests. IBM took him on as an engineer in 1934 at its Columbia University and Endicott laboratories in New York. In 1952 he assembled a research team in Silicon Valley to examine magnetic disk storage, and in late 1955 the team presented the first functioning hard drive to IBM management. The RAMAC was very large, weighing one ton, but it met IBM's specifications, with access to any given file averaging about one second.