And so begins the rest of my life.
 

After 42 years in the disk drive industry, in one form or another, I am retiring. It's been a long journey from the days with IBM mainframe hard drive to our current offering of drives. I started screwing screws on the line. I'm now leaving as an engineer. I many cases still working with the same people as when I started. Good luck to them all. How I can devote my remaining years to becoming a racetrack junky. There is always a race that needs to be started somewhere!

Congrats 👏 . My dad retired from IBM .

Congrats! So from drives to driving.

Very cool, plus you live a great place, my favorite part of the world.

But remember, starting a race is all fun and games until someone gets their eye poked out:

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1635879221.jpg

I wish you the best!

Congrats! You must have left this job with lots of memories and a magnetic personality ;).

Congrats & may you have a long, healthy, & happy retirement. After 17 years, I hardly remember what I did before I retired. Don't know if that's good or bad so can't recommend it one way or the other.

Enjoy!

RESET all bits to 0 format c:> *.*

Congrats! Enjoy the everyday is Saturday experience.

Those drives had to have been space shuttle quality.

Congratulations to you.

One story. Late 80's in Houston. Gessner and 610. Bob, the IT guy on our audit staff tells Millie, the boss man's secretary, to tell everybody to get their 5 1/4" floppy discs out of sight because there was a partial eclipse of the sun coming that afternoon.

She lays the knowledge on 35 people until someone tipped her off.

Does that mean Format C drive? Saw a dude do that in Anchorage with his Compaq accidentally.

No doubt that you saw a lot in your 42 years; lots of advancements and miniaturization. Leave with a sense of pride for your contributions and don't spend much time looking back.

A good friend corrects anybody who says they are retired by informing them that they are really redirected. Seems right to me.

Enjoy a life of Saturdays.

Congratulations. If you are like the rest of us retirees you will be busier in retirement then when you worked!

Shark? FastT?

Congrats Ron! The 'Every-day-is-Saturday' lifestyle is hard to beat :cool:

Well, you can start with the Velocity Invitational at Laguna Seca coming up on Nov. 11-14th. And if you happen to be active or retired military, Friday the 12th, Veterans Day, is a freebee. Even if you're not a vet, you can still get Friday tix for free...no proof of vet status required.

https://velocityinvitational.com/

Congrats!

My first hard drive was 40MB.

Congrats, I hope to be like you in a couple years!

welcome aboard...

I could see the American dream was a lie when I was young enough to do something about it.

In my late 30's I did not stop working, I was self employed, I did however take a smaller salary, hire the right people and barely worked for 5 years and had a blast, I raced my car, I took lots of vacations, I bought a vacation home, spent 50% of my time per year there. I did whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. We partied in clubs in Miami and West Palm Beach until the sun came up. We had a total and complete blast.

When I was "working" I would come in late after going to the gym, spend 6-7 hours working M-Th and 4 hours on Friday, took long lunches, visited with friends when I was not in the mood to be in the office. etc..

I did not make as much as I could have, I did not save as much as I should have.. and I have no regrets. Zero.

I got this idea from my first employee's parents. They moved to FloRida from Connecticut, they were about 50 years old and both in fantastic shape. His mom was a smoke show. The sold their home for a nice profit and rented a cheap rental here. They both moved down with no jobs lined up and spent a year just playing. I admired them for that, taking a little retirement while they could really enjoy it. I remembered that and worked to try to emulate that.

I was able to do it in the late 30's and had a blast. Now in my mid 50's I am planning on doing it again in 1-2 years from now. Going to take a lot of time off and enjoy my free time with my wife while we are both reasonably young and able.

No real health issues and both in great shape, I am really looking forward to early retirement part 2, part 3 will be when I actually hit retirement age. Or will it?

I can see grinding for 10 years again then throttling back to working less but enjoying life. I cannot see ever closing down my business, I enjoy what I do and think it will be good to have purpose in my older years to keep me up and moving and sharp.

You'd have seen go from floppy to hard.

Fantastic Ron!
I thought you might already be retired.
Thrilled to hear you will be at the track more.
What race tracks will you be at mostly? Bay area?
I'm in if it's sound free.
Big Willow for us this weekend.

Hope to see you waving a green flag and not a fishing pole. :D

My first IBM PC Clone (AT) had dual floppies! I did splurge for the extra 2Mhz processor buying the 10Mhz machine rather than the 8Mhz!

I couldn't even swing the $200 or so for a used 5MB drive at the swap meet.

I've got the real deal IBM twin floppy machine in the attic. And the DOS book and the IBM book. I think I bet on the wrong horse :( If I had an Apple from the same era it would be worth something.

My first hard drive was a 10 MB drive in my 4.77 MHz PC, with DOS 2.1. About that time the local hard drive maker was eventually bought by Segate. They came in our photo studio pushing a small fridge sized piece of equipment that was a 1 GB hard drive, another employee was carrying a large box of 1.2 MB floppies that would be 1 GB of storage total, and the new 3.5 inch prototype 1 GB hard drive.

I remember drooling all over it, and thinking how there is no way I could ever fill up a full gigabyte!

We took photos of the drives for their advertising and internal publications. It was several years later before I got my first drive that was over a gigabyte. Now my several year old cell phone has 256 Gig of storage.

One of the engineers we worked with was the guy that wrote the firmware for the controller boards. He could almost "think" in assembly language. He was the guy you think of for the 1980s photo of a nerd-alpha geek.

Congrats.

i'm too jealous to type anything more :)

I'm already signed up. I'll be in the Starter's Stand. I volunteer as one of the Starter with San Fransisco Region of the SCCA.

December it will be 4 years retired for me . I truly enjoy every day and miss nothing about work . It is a transition but you will learn to enjoy every day in a different way .

Ever thought of the "Ring"? I've shipped my RS America to Europe 3 times, 190 laps on the Ring 162 mph on the Autobahn. It's really quite easy. I'd vbe happy to share any info with you, costs, shipping company to use, Hotels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuzPcRyTkZM&t=12s Discover Germany TV
https://studio.youtube.com/video/1Cr8bmBi3Ts/edit RS America on the Autobahn
https://www.flickr.com/photos/2010-2011_european_tour/albums some pictures I took

Let the Ring tickle your fantasies. My best was 12 laps in One Stint,

I have a bucket list of tracks to work (Starter);
<ul>
<li>VIR
<li>Indy
<li>Long Beach
<li>Road America
<li>...
</ul>
I did get to check one item off my list this year. Back Up Starter for IMSA at Laguna Seca.

Congratulations. Have fun at all those tracks.

Congrats on the retirement. 42 years sounds like you already are late to the party!

On that note, doesn't the rest of our lives begin every day? No day will you wake up younger than the day before. So make use of it!

G

Congratulations!

Judging by your location, did you start at Seagate? How many merger / acquisitions have you seen?

It's pricey up there Ron, that event is $2k to enter 1 car, second car entered $1k.
So I stayed local this month.
That's more than Reunion. ;)