Dr. C. Denis Mee

A key technologist and pioneer in the computer industry; namely in the hard drive industryhe joined IBM , in 1962 at Yorktown Heights, NY as a research staff member. He transferred to the Advanced Technology group in San Jose, CA in 1965 where he was involved in contributing to and managing several ground-breaking data storage technology programs such as IBM's film heads for hard disk drives and several types of optical storage technologies. He was a founder of IBM's Magnetic Recording Institute (MRI) and was its first director in 1982. In 1983, he was appointed IBM Fellow He was born in England, grew up and went to high school in The Midlands during World War II. At the end of the war he went to Nottingham University to study Physics. He had been accepted at Cambridge, but was pre-empted by returning service men since they had priority. It worked out well because Nottingham was one of three universities that specialized in magnetism, and he stayed at Nottingham until 1951 where he was able to do his thesis on the magnetic properties of ferromagnetic materials. This bode well for his later career. He received a London Bachelor's degree of Physics, but then when he started the PhD, Nottingham became a university so he was granted a Nottingham Ph.D.; one of the first Nottingham Ph.D.?s in that school. In 1954, before coming before going to the U.S. (1957), he worked for MSS Recording Company, in London that was in the process of developing magnetic tape for data storage. This was his first encounter with the computer industry, and it was a government project to upgrade magnetic tape, which was mostly used for audio recording. IBM, at that time, had just developed a 1/2-inch tape drive, and 3M supplied the tapes for IBM. His job was on a British government-sponsored project. Among the books he has authored, co-authored or edited are: ?Physics of Magnetic Recording?, North Holland Pub. Co. (1964); with Eric Daniel, ?Magnetic Recording? (3 volumes), McGraw-Hill (1987); and "Magnetic Recording: The First 100 Years", edited with Eric D. Daniel and Mark H. Clark, Copyright 1999, IEEEIn 1994 he received the IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Award "for contributions to the design of optical, magneto-optical, and magnetic recording files". He retired from IBM in 1993. He became a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in 1996.