C. Denis Mee

A key technologist and pioneer in the computer industry—namely in the hard drive industry—Mee joined IBM in 1962 at Yorktown Heights, NY as a research staff member. He transferred to the Advanced Technology group in San Jose, CA in 1965, where he was involved in contributing to and managing several ground-breaking data storage technology programs, such as IBM's film heads for hard disk drives and several types of optical storage technologies. He was a founder of IBM's Magnetic Recording Institute (MRI) and served as its first director in 1982. In 1983, he was appointed IBM Fellow.

Mee was born in England, grew up, and went to high school in The Midlands during World War II. At the end of the war he went to Nottingham University to study Physics. He had been accepted at Cambridge, but was pre-empted by returning service men since they had priority. It worked out well because Nottingham was one of three universities that specialized in magnetism, and he stayed at Nottingham until 1951, where he was able to do his thesis on the magnetic properties of ferromagnetic materials. This boded well for his later career.

He received a London Bachelor's degree in Physics, but then when he started the PhD, Nottingham became a university, so he was granted a Nottingham Ph.D.—one of the first Nottingham Ph.D.'s from that school. In 1954, before going to the U.S. (1957), Mee worked for MSS Recording Company in London, which was in the process of developing magnetic tape for data storage. This was his first encounter with the computer industry, and it was a government project to upgrade magnetic tape, which was mostly used for audio recording. IBM, at that time, had just developed a 1/2-inch tape drive, and 3M supplied the tapes for IBM. His job was on a British government-sponsored project.

Among the books he authored, co-authored, or edited are: Physics of Magnetic Recording, North Holland Pub. Co. (1964); with Eric Daniel, Magnetic Recording (3 volumes), McGraw-Hill (1987); and Magnetic Recording: The First 100 Years, edited with Eric D. Daniel and Mark H. Clark, IEEE (1999). In 1994, Mee received the IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Award "for contributions to the design of optical, magneto-optical, and magnetic recording files." He retired from IBM in 1993 and became a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in 1996.