Mr. John (Jack) Clemens

Born and raised in a small town outside of Chicago ? Naperville, Illinois, he was part of the IBM team that developed the RAMAC and is considered to be among those who ?built? Silicon Valley. He graduated from the University of Illinois with a Bachelor?s degree in Electrical Engineering. During his junior and senior year in college, he entered an internship program at Los Alamos and after completing college, he worked at the Los Alamos Laboratory for two years in the electronics division, which supported the physics group, doing various experiments. He then joined IBM in 1957, where he worked on early RAMAC production engineering, and then on several disk storage programs until leaving IBM in 1970. This was at a time when computers used to take up huge rooms and computer storage was on a stack of dozens of 24-inch disks that the RAMAC used for memory. He spent years helping push technology forward to the point where it became physically possible for every person to have a computer in his or her home, and then in his or her pocket. He participated in the disk drive programs of several independent manufacturers such as Memorex, Datapoint, Winchester and Maxtor , at times as a manager, and at times as a consultant, until 2002, when he retired from the data storage industry. He then became an industry consultant.