Happy Birthday, Brother Bill!

Dan and Bill, Summer 1945.
Typecast, even as kids.

Taking a break from Plainfield today to wish my baby brother Bill a happy birthday!

Bill and his wife Barbara recently celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. They moved to Arizona right after getting married, where Bill had been sent by IBM to work on the famed "Winchester" project.

These washing-machine-sized Winchester drives were
state-of-the-art in the 1960s, with their 10-inch metal platters.
Today, a thumb drive can hold all this data, with room to spare.

You might say the Winchester Drive is the great-great-grandaddy of the thumb drive, though the storage mechanism is quite different. Putting data on a drive separate from the main computer memory was a revolutionary development and sealed the eventual doom of tape storage (tape? yes, tape).

They raised their family in Tucson and all have become "westerners" ranging from Arizona to California to Washington State. Except for grand-nephew Chip who came East for college.

A devotee of Tae Kwon Do, which he studied while in the Air Force, Bill has operated his own studio in Tucson for over forty years.

Now retired, Bill and Barbara frequently escape the dry heat of the Sonoran desert to Hawaii, where they find afternoon rain showers interesting.

Happy Birthday, little brother -- and many more!

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  -- Dan Damon [follow]

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