Integrated disk controller brings disk drives to desktop.

Infrastructure means the difference between successful technology implementation and eternal Alpha stage qualification. One of the enabling technologies significant to the disk drive industry was the integrated disk controller, which brought disk drives to desktop systems in the early '80s. Sherri Besser, director of marketing for Western Digital, shared a few thoughts on this with Mark Ferelli.

How did that project come about? We had a lot of chips--about a 10-chip set. And we thought, "Wouldn't it be great if we integrated all these functions into a single device?" Which we did--and that became the 1010 controller. We were just building chips at the time, and then a customer said: "We need a reference platform to show us how to integrate your chips onto boards." So we supplied them with a reference platform. And they said, "This is really cool.

Can we just buy your reference platform?" That's how we got into the controller board business.

What was the greatest technological challenge in developing this? Getting all of these things to work together in a LSI device was very challenging

Who were some of the early customers for the integrated controller? Digital Equipment Corporation was a huge customer of ours. Basically, they helped drive the controller as a product. They were our biggest customer. And then, of course, we had Wang. Some ancient customers include Commodore and Atari.

How was the integrated controller received? Phenomenally well. Western Digital started hugely growing after the introduction of that chip. We basically had that chip and then we had the floppy disk controller as well.

So you sort of grew with the desktop then didn't you? We sure did.

And you have that continuing with the Caviar series today, right? Yes. In fact, I don't know if you know this but Western Digital helped develop the IDE interface. So it was Western Digital, CDC, and Compaq. And the three of us got together and designed what the connector interface from the IDE drive looked like and how it worked.

Were the three companies able to work together without a lot of political grief? Amazingly well. And it became the standard for the industry. Standards were harder to settle on in those days. That was the other thing that we did. When we came up with this, we didn't charge royalty fees or licensing or anything. We wanted it to be an open standard so that everybody could use it.

And now you've seen it progress from IDE to EIDE and then into ATA and SATA. Where do you go from here controller-wise? That's a good question. As you know, we use outside houses that design our controller chips. We take their technology and integrate it into our hard disk drives. And basically the question after this is going to be, "What comes next in the SATA arena?" And obviously it's SATA II and 300 gigabits per second.

Is there anything in the development of that original controller that especially rings in your memory? Just the number of different tries we went through to get it right.

You went through a lot of Alpha revisions? Yes. We started at a I think, and by the time we got everything worked out we were at s or t.

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