One of the innovators of Ukrainian origin whom I spoke about in my presentation last week at UC Berkeley is Lubomyr Romankiw.

IBM researchers Lubomyr Romankiw and David Thompson invented magnetic thin film storage heads in the late 1970s. These are used in hard disk drives (HDDs) to read and write information stored as magnetic bits. It also led to decreasing their cost and size thus leading to mass adoption in future years.

“When people ask me, ‘show me what I am using of yours when I use the laptop?’, my answer is very simple: hit the keys - you see the picture on the screen, my head is already working, seven patents are already working for you”

- said Lubomyr Romankiw in his interview six years ago.

Romankiw is listed as a co-inventor on over 90 U.S. patents. In his interview he further mentioned:

“I also have 180 discoveries that are not patented.”

Romankiw said he realized that he could utilize electrochemistry to develop the technology for magnetic thin film storage heads. But he said he didn’t realize the impact it could have on the future.

And it had a profound impact - Steve Wozniak bought hard drives from IBM and in his garage built a personal computer. Apple started a very short time after that.

But what’s interesting is Romankiw’s personality. When asked why he didn’t call his magnetic thin film storage heads “Romankiw’s head” but just called them magnetic heads for recording information, he said “I just didn’t want to give my last name as I didn’t have any exaggerated ideas about myself.”

“The reason why you probably haven’t heard about me, because to me an invention – it’s a normal thing of life. I don’t make a big thing out of it. I would go inform my manager that I made this breakthrough. They say ‘Terrific, we are very glad, see if you can now put it into manufacturing’. So then I worked to put it into manufacturing. But it’s a way of life.”

He worked for IBM until he was 85 years old.

Even though solid-state drives (SSDs) which have no moving parts are now used in many laptops and personal computers, HDDs are still the cheapest way to store data and without a doubt this original invention led to a revolution of how we communicate and store information.