IBM 1997 Annual Report Download - page 23

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LIKE MOST STUNNING TECHNOLOGICAL FEATS,
OUR SUCCESS IN HARD-DISK DRIVES BEGINS WITH
GENIUS; in this case, scientists and engineers whose
special gift is knowing how to pack information into
ever-smaller physical spaces. In 1997 they delivered
the world’s highest-capacity hard drives — compact
units about the size of an audiocassette — and sur-
passed their own world record for hard-disk drive
capacity, cramming each square inch of disk space
with the equivalent of an 18-story-high stack of double-
spaced typed pages.
As striking as the technology leadership is,
there’s an even bigger story of marketplace leader-
ship and global teamwork: researchers in California;
engineers in Japan and the United States (who integrate
the components in lightweight, rugged packaging);
and the efficiency of high-volume manufacturing
teams around the world, who produce low-cost,
high-quality drives that we sell to more than 60 other
companies, many of them our competitors.
Today, two in five laptop computers in the world
contain an IBM hard-disk drive. That’s one reason
why this business grew roughly twice as fast as the
rest of the disk drive industry last year.
Representatives of IBM’s storage business: research, development, manufacturing, operations,
OEM marketing, sales and support from San Jose, California, and Fujisawa, Japan 21
world records start here