Mason Lamar Williams

Background and education Mason Lamar Williams was born in San Mateo, California on 20 January 1943. His parents were Mason Lamar Williams Jr. (1915-1991) and Helen Williams. His father had a long prestigious career in the Army. The family lived in various parts of the US and overseas. In 2002, the IBM HDD division was purchased by Hitachi. Williams worked for Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) and continued to conduct fundamental research and modeling of magnetic recording physics and on HDD system integration. After Williams retired from Hitachi GST in 2005, he played a major role in the restoration of the IBM RAMAC, the first commercial hard disk drive. This work was done at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. He volunteered as a docent at the museum and gave weekly demonstrations of the drive.

Awards and recognition In 1999, Williams was elevated to the grade of IEEE Fellow for "contributions to the understanding of the digital magnetic recording process and the continued progress of areal density of disk drives". In 2006 Williams was selected as a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Magnetics Society. He gave a presentation entitled "Beyond the Limits of Magnetic Recording: An Itinerant Magnetician Looks at Hysterical Loops"

Williams was a prolific inventor and authored or coauthored 27 US Patents. Several of the patents are highly cited, notably on magnetoresistive read heads, Shingled Recording and perpendicular recording. Williams was recognized as an IBM Master Inventor in 2001 Williams was the author of numerous technical papers on magnetic recording and was particularly noted for his early collaboration with Larry Comstock that resulted in the eponymous Williams-Comstock model that allowed the optimization of the written transitions that carry data in magnetic recording