I was visiting the Computer History Museum last year, when I noticed a machine in a glass case that looked like a big jukebox for the Space Age, cylindrical and gleaming. But instead of playing 45 RPM vinyl records, it was a display of the Random Access Method of Accounting and Control (RAMAC) disk storage system, part of IBM’s groundbreaking 1956 RAMAC 305 computer system. This was a revolutionary computer system, the first to use a hard disk drive for data storage.
As I was reading the exhibit captions, a memory came to mind: When I was interviewing my dad for a family history project, didn’t he mention working as a junior draftsman at the IBM lab in San Jose where they developed the RAMAC in the 1950s? Yes, he did.
At age 93, my father, Nicholas F. Garcia, may be one of the last people around who worked at IBM’s first R&D lab on the West Coast, in the center of what would become Silicon Valley.
He was a young draftsman at 99 Notre Dame Ave. in San Jose, California, a building IBM rented near downtown, where the RAMAC project, begun in 1952, was completed in 1956.
“It was the first computer system conceived around a radically new magnetic disk storage device. The extremely large capacity, rapid access, and low cost of magnetic disk storage revolutionized computer architecture, performance, and applications.” (citation: Milestones:RAMAC, 1956, Engineering and Technology History Wiki.)
After I confirmed that my Dad had worked in that historic lab, I mentioned it to Kirsten Tashev, vice president and chief curatorial and exhibitions officer, when we both were attending a CHM event, and she got things rolling. Would my Dad like to see a demo of the RAMAC in action? And would he be interested in being interviewed for an oral history in the CHM studio?
One thing led to another. I had the pleasure of seeing my father interviewed about his life and experiences at that early IBM lab for the Computer History Museum’s Oral History program.
Caption: Nicholas F. Garcia, being interviewed by Computer History Museum Senior Curator Dag Spicer, in the CHM studio for the CHM Oral History program. (Mountain View, CA. December 2, 2024. Photo credit: Dawn Garcia)
And he had quite a story to tell. My father has led an adventurous life—and the span of his career gave him a front-row seat and engineering role in the development of space and missiles technology in Silicon Valley.
Little did he know when he was picking cotton as a teenager in California’s Central Valley that he would later be designing re-entry mechanisms on space vehicles for Lockheed Missiles & Space Corporation (now Lockheed Martin).
Nicholas F. Garcia, age 16, shouldering a 100-pound bag of cotton he had picked by hand. (Mendota, California, 1947. Credit: Family of Nicholas F. Garcia)
He worked as an engineer at Lockheed in Sunnyvale for more than 30 years, hired a few years after the aerospace company moved its Missiles Systems Division from Burbank to Sunnyvale. He raised his family in San Jose and Cupertino, where the acres of fruit orchards—which exploded in white and pink blossoms each spring—gave way to acres of low-slung buildings of the booming computer industry.
Caption: Nicholas F. Garcia (center, rear), a young engineer at Lockheed Space & Missiles in Sunnyvale, pictured with a production team that built a test fixture that he had designed. The gimbal—a pivoted support that allows an object to rotate freely in one or more directions—was used to test reentry bodies for submarine-launched missiles. Garcia worked for Lockheed for more than 30 years. (Sunnyvale, 1961. Photo credit: Nicholas F. Garcia)
But first, he worked at IBM as a young man. He had served in the Air Force in the Korean War and returned to the Bay Area to attend college on the GI Bill. He was 25 years old.
In 1956, he won a drafting competition at San Jose City College where he was studying engineering. The prize, he said, was a summer job as a draftsman at IBM. He remembers an environment of creativity and innovation, with about 50 young engineers working at 99 Notre Dame Ave., coming up with new ideas for IBM. “They were a very tight knit group of people who helped each other,” he said.
Nick’s job was as a junior draftsman, creating drawings to document the RAMAC, using pen on linen, not paper. He recalled that the drawings were being sent to IBM's headquarters in New York.
It was IBM’s first venture into California. He remembered them talking about the IBM culture in “pep talks.”
“Every Tuesday, we would have an all-hands meeting in a little studio, and on the screen would be a talk by some higher executive of IBM,” Nick said. “They would tell us where the project was, how things were going. And then also, to talk about the IBM way of life… people were concerned that this lab was the first step that IBM made into San Jose… They did not want people from that lab going out into San Jose and projecting an image that was not right.”
An element of that good impression was a strict dress code, Nick said. Everyone wore ties—even on the weekends. “I thought it was cool,” he said.
Nick was so inspired by the work of the IBM engineers, that he switched his college major from civil engineering to mechanical engineering. “I really loved the conceptual engineering they were doing. Very, very challenging, but still having to come up with a mechanical solution to a concept. I really admired that.”
But the summer ended, and Nick left to go to San Jose State University to study engineering, earn his degree, and went to work at Lockheed. He never ended up working again for IBM, but he remembered the IBM way fondly.
“What I saw in those first days at that summer job embedded in me an engineering value that the engineer is required to do something, but he has to be given the opportunity and the freedom to do the research and the conceptual work,” Nick said. “At IBM, from what I saw, they respected the engineer.”
Watch Nick's oral history interview below, or read the transcript.
Oral History of Nicholas F. Garcia | CHM, Dec. 2, 2024
