R&D Electrical Engineer with System Test Equipment Engineering Group at Sandia National Laboratories
It’s not uncommon to find that engineers and scientists are reluctant to change. Unlike new features on your smart phone, new ideas in engineering and science can be received with a cold shoulder and large doses of skepticism. For anyone in the field, the statement “this is the way we have always been doing it” is heard numerous times during engineering design sessions. Most engineering teams would rather spend their time designing an automatic screwdriver than designing a new screw.

For many of us, it’s difficult to recall a time when our mobile phones were too big for our pockets, or our laptops weren’t paper-thin. But it wasn’t long ago that disk drives – the technology that stores data on digital devices – were the size of a room. Today, while they’re more like the size of a credit card and still shrinking, the sheer amount of data we’re saving to them continues to explode.

It’s a data storage problem José Moura predicted – and solved – 20 years ago.