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2007 Physics Nobel Prize For Giant Magnetoresistance
A number of readers made sure we are aware that the 2007 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to Albert Fert and Peter Grunberg for simultaneously and independently discovering giant magnetoresistance. This property has allowed the explosion of disk-space growth and is cited as being one of the first nanotechnology breakthroughs. From the announcement: "Very weak magnetic changes give rise to major differences in electrical resistance in a GMR system. A system of this kind is the perfect tool for reading data from hard disks when information registered magnetically has to be converted to electric current."
So in the end, each scientist nets about $750K USD, unless I dropped a decimal point somewhere.
These were the guys who discovered the effect. And I suppose they deserve Nobel prizes of it.
But it was IBM's Almaden Research Lab - and a lot of blood, sweat, toil and materials science - that turned GMR into a commercial reality.
And then, some yrs later, IBM turned around and sold its whole disk drive division to Hitachi.
But I imagine they did so with something more than a gleam in their eye. And I doubt that gleam was flash memory.
Disk drives have become another brutal low/no margin business. In fact they've been that way for a long time. You can come up with something new like Toshiba's first 1" drive that made the first iPods possible. But even those drives commanded a premium for some finite period of time.
It's history maybe quite a few people don't know, but IBM invented RAM (aka DRAM). Randomly accessible memory. Prior to that, you actually had to sequentially read your way through main memory to find what you wanted. Something in the way tape drives used to work, and possibly still work (don't spend a lot of time keeping up on tape drive technology).
And it (RAM) cost (I think) something like $1 bln in 1970 dollars.