Jack Harker

John Mason "Jack" Harker (June 29, 1926 – April 27, 2013) was an inventor, mechanical engineer, and product and program manager who pioneered development of disk storage systems. Starting as a member of the original team that developed the first disk storage system, he went on to develop IBM Direct Access Storage products for the next 35 years. Over that time, Harker was twice director of the IBM San Jose Storage Laboratories, an IBM Fellow, and a IEEE Fellow. He retired from IBM in 1987 and died in 2013.

Jack Harker was born in San Francisco in 1926 and during World War II enlisted in the Navy becoming an electronics repair specialist, serving on board in both the Atlantic and Pacific. He received his BA in Mechanical Engineering from Swarthmore in 1950 and Masters in Mechanical Engineering from University of California Berkeley in 1952. In 1962 he received a Masters in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

"It isn't often someone gets an opportunity to see an industry get born. Or to participate in its beginning, participate in its formative years, and then still be around to see it become a major worldwide industry."

Harker advanced through a series of positions at IBM to become the IBM San Jose Laboratory Director in 1972. He is best known for his leadership of the 1311 Disk File project, but he considered the 1350/1360 (Cypress) Image Storage System his most challenging assignment and the creation of the Technology and Advanced Development Group (TAD) in 1969 amongst his most important accomplishments.

After graduating from Berkeley he was hired in 1952 by Reynold B. Johnson as the eighteenth employee of the new IBM design laboratory in San Jose, California USA. An early project was as a mechanical engineer on the original team developing the IBM 350 RAMAC disk storage unit, the world's first hard disk drive.

After RAMAC his next project was working for Alan Shugart on the IBM 1301. Harker led development of the first self flying disk heads. As Air Bearing Development Manager, Harker led the development effort for self-acting air bearings, which lowered the disk heads and relied on flying them over the surface using the air flow from the disk underneath instead of the pressurized air from an air compressor as used by RAMAC. Hard disk drives today continue to use self-acting air bearings.

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