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IBM Tape History – Session 4: LTO Virtual Company Panel: John Teale, Ed Childers, Bruce Master, Brad Johns Moderated by: Tom Gardner Recorded: October 15, 2015 Tucson, AZ CHM Reference number: X7684.2016 © 2015 Computer History Museum IBM Tape History – Session 4: LTO virtual company panel Introduction This is session one of five sessions held in Tucson, AZ, regarding IBM’s tape storage history. The five sessions are: 1. Tape Media (CHM catalog number: 102737992) 2. Overview of tape products and product management (CHM catalog number: 102737994) 3. 3480 tape drive (CHM catalog number: 102738021) 4. Linear Tape Open (LTO) Consortium (CHM catalog number: 102738023) 5. Recovery of tapes damaged in Challenger disaster (CHM catalog number: 102738025). See IBM Tape History Session 1: Media for an overview of IBM Tucson, This session is about the Linear Tape Open consortium organized by HP, IBM and Seagate beginning 1997. Interview Tom Gardner: This is Tom Gardner, representing the Computer History Museum at our fourth IBM Tucson tape history recording session at the headquarters of West Press Inc., in Tucson, Arizona. Today's session will focus initially on LTO, an acronym which our first interviewee, John Teale, will explain. John Teale: Good morning, I have gone through my biography in some of our other sessions1, so I'm not going to spend too much time on it; just to remind you, I am a retired IBM engineer. I worked there for 31 years. All of my 31 years was in tape technology, the tape business, tape product development, participating broadly through the worldwide market, in other words, all of them. Today we're going to talk about LTO. LTO stands for Linear Tape Open. I have three guests with me that we'll be introducing in a little while to talk about some different aspects of what I'll call the birth of LTO. LTO was announced in November of 1997. There was a joint announcement from three large companies: IBM, HP, and Seagate, of their intention to develop a new interchange recording standard for a tape drive, to be developed. It's important to distinguish between what LTO is and what it isn't. It is not a collaboration to produce a product by three companies. It was simply a collaboration to agree on how we would be able to interchange data with each other - the ability to go produce that product was an independent effort by each company. Let me say that LTO is a current, ongoing business. Technically, you could say that LTO is not history yet. However, the announcement of the consortia in 1997 is history, and that's the history that we're going to talk about today. We're not talking about the IBM LTO products. That would be another day, and another set of people. So I'm going to set this up by talking about the what, the who, and the why. And in order to do that, I need to do a little backstory on what the IBM environment was like in 1997, what was the tape market like in 1 See IBM Tape History – Session 2: Overview, beginning circa p. 27, recorded October 13, 2015, CHM catalog number 102737994 CHM Ref: X7684.2016 © 2015 Computer History Museum Page 2 of 67 IBM Tape History – Session 4: LTO virtual company panel 1997, and that's what developed the motivation for what later happened, and I think will make it very clear. So we'll start with the IBM environment in early 1997. We talked in some of our other sessions about how we had developed a bunch of technology in the early '90s, that we were intending to use to enable the follow-on to the 3480 and 3490 series of products. They would later become known as 3590 and 3570, but our efforts in 1992 were interrupted because the regime at the time decided that we were going to exit the tape business. That pile of technology was put on a shelf. Many of us redeployed to other activities. One of the activities I was redeployed to was buying other people's stuff, and qualifying it for other IBM servers, like quarter-inch cassette, four millimeter and eight millimeter drives and media. So that's how I met all of the players in the tape universe. Other people were redeployed, some people were simply told, you're on managed departure, and you can simply stay home and get paid until we decide when we're going to exit you. So it was a pretty tough time. But we had a regime change, within a year or two. A fellow named Jim Vanderslice and his team came in, and reversed that decision, and said, "We're going to get back in the business, dust that pile of technology you had, and get it deployed." And he had a lot of ideas from his printer background on opportunities for tape that we didn't see for ourselves. So for example, in printers, they have the equivalent of what they call the razorblade model. Sell them the printer, or even give them the printer, and then make a lot of money selling them ink, and paper, and maintenance, and parts, and service. Because tape has a removable component, namely, the media cartridge, these are typically not produced by the drive manufacturers. There's a whole separate industry infrastructure that produces these. These can be thought of as the razorblades, if you will. And Jim Vanderslice envisioned a model where to the extent that drive maker’s intellectual property is required to produce the media cartridge, then there was an opportunity to extract profit from the people that make these things, and sell these things. And we simply are the market-makers who deliver the drive, the capability, and the value proposition. Pretty exciting stuff. I didn't really understand much of what it meant at the time, not having ever experienced this type of business model. But we had a problem. In early 1997, Barbara Grant and Kevin Reardon, who were our leaders at the time, told me that we're getting back in the technology business, and I said, "Well, that's going to be pretty tough to do, because we put all of our thin film head equipment in vans in the parking lot, and sold it on the used equipment market. All of the tape head developers and designers are either retired, dead, or working for competitors." And there's a little bit true, all three of those statements, unfortunately, it was true. And he said, "Well, we want to be back in the technology game, how do we get in it?" And I said, "The only way we're going to be in it is go to San Jose, and beg the hard disk people to help us out." Is it possible to make a tape head in a hard disk line? We didn't know the answer. They told me, they gave me a ticket to San Jose and said, "Good luck." I was in San Jose six months. It took me six months to hire the first tape head manager in San Jose. What I learned about the San Jose environment is that when you're asking people to consider an opportunity or a challenge, they've got four godfathers and three godmothers they have to check with that are helping them manage their career before they'll even talk to you. Tape was not viewed as an opportunity, it wasn't viewed as glamorous, it wasn't viewed as anything that would enhance the resume of a hard disk engineer. Kevin came out, and said, "Okay, you've got interviews lined up for me?" And I said, "No, Kevin, I don't have anybody who wants to talk to you about this job." Kevin, very creative guy, rebranded the job as a notch your belt, one year in and out, great CHM Ref: X7684.2016 © 2015 Computer History Museum Page 3 of 67 IBM Tape History – Session 4: LTO virtual company panel opportunity to enhance your resume. He sold it to the highest executives in San Jose at the time, in particular, Bob Scranton. And Scranton endorsed it, and pretty soon, we were getting the best and brightest candidates out of Almaden Research, applying for this job. First manager we hired was Shole Hasami, who did the technology transfer from Almaden to San Jose, on something called a Spin Valve Head. I don't even know what a Spin Valve Head is, but it sounded pretty fancy to me. Can I have some of that stuff? <Laughs> Long story short, we finally got some people going. We had a media partner at the time, and we ended up expanding our search for other media partners, because the media partner we had was about as obsolete as we were, in terms of reentering the technology game. And we had resolve, we had sponsorship, now what? Now let's talk about, a little bit about the business environment at IBM, and then we'll go shift to the market as a whole. One of the reasons that the decision was even made in the first place that we might exit the tape business is because all of IBM's internal development efforts were aimed solely at what we called the enterprise market. In other words, mainframe attachment. So our business was growing with that market growth, which was low single digits. That was not a shiny-looking P&L to IBM, because the new regime of IBM were growth, maniacally focused on growing your business faster that the industry.

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