Hard Drive! a Silicon Valley High Tech Adventure Novel

“Hard Drive!” is a Silicon Valley high-tech adventure novel set during the rise of Seagate Technology, today's leading maker of computer hard disc drives. My years at Seagate were so extraordinary I felt driven to tell their stories.

Book excerpts and ordering at Amazon.com

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Read my latest Blog

SEE my Russia trip movie!

Moscow sights, songs, and today's better Russian lives.

Cruise the Volga River to see the historical beauty of Saint Petersburg.

(First read Chapter 52 of Hard Drive, "Communist Disc Drives," to see how dreary Russian lives were only 20 years ago)

Computers in Victorian England

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Signed book copies available. Begin your adventure now!

• Craziness was commonplace in early Seagate for the company to survive, which its own women and men called a “cowboy company.” Impossible to capture in a simple documentary, this is a fictionalized novel of craziness, excitement, and tears as Seagate first thrived with its invention of the personal computer hard disc drive, nearly died, survived, and finally arrived dominant in drives. Every chapter is based on a true happening

• It’s an adventure of a lifetime of a magnetics researcher turned design engineer, participating in the half-century of disk drive progress led by colorful and intriguing pioneers that took drives from a dream of Ada, Countess of Lovelace in Victorian England, to today’s drives that hold the world's information and empower the Internet.

• The book's background reveals little known Silicon Valley startup company realities: the engineering “alligators” that arise in product manufacturing to threaten sales and profits; the Silicon valley business competition model of simultaneous product design, sales and revenue; women in technology; U.S. patent system shortcomings in protecting commodity electronics; fighting frivolous lawsuits; and U.S. tax policies that encourage employers to send manufacturing jobs to foreign lands, barely hinted at by U.S. government leaders. Plus Plato and quantum mechanics on the origins of our universe .
  

• You'll like this book if you enjoyed Michael Crichton's "Disclosure"

Book Cover