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John Joseph Lynott (August 26, 1920, Johnson City, NY – April 20, 1994, Los Gatos, CA) was an American inventor and engineer.

Early Life and Education John was born in Johnson City, New York to Martin A. and Elizabeth Egan Lynott and raised in Endicott, New York. He attended Syracuse University with the goal of studying engineering, until his counselor told him he didn’t have what it took to be an engineer and steered him toward business. With no interest or talent for business, he dropped out of college and joined the Navy in 1942, where he served as an aviation machinist. Returning from war in 1945, he was turned down by IBM on the east coast for a job due to his lack of a college degree, so in 1946 he and his new bride, Rita (nee McLaughlin) drove to the then yet-to-be-formed Silicon Valley where he launched his career and he has his wife started their family of eight children in Los Gatos, CA.

Career Lynott earned 25 patents over a 27-year career with IBM—including the hallmark of his career, a shared patent for the [|IBM 350 RAMAC] disk drive or the “Data Storage Machine”. He shares this patent with his colleagues [|William A. Goddard] and Louis B. Stevens. Along with Goddard, Lynott was inducted into the US-based National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2007 for their work on the RAMAC. Lynott was deeply involved in a broad and diverse body of work as a mechanical designer at IBM in the areas of disk memory, magnetic tape drives, electrostatic printers, optical scanners, displays and data entry devices.

The deceptive ease with which John’s mind worked in visualizing new concepts placed him in high regard of his colleagues. His sense of humor and gentle manner enabled him to work effectively with people in the demanding task of creating new systems of computer hardware. A notable factor in all of John’s designs is that they are aesthetically pleasing to the eyes. Probably one of John’s outstanding qualities is his contribution in all the diverse areas in which he worked.

Amphibious Fighting Vehicles and Fruit Pitters Lynott’s career began in 1947 at the Food Machinery Corporation (FMC), in San Jose, California, as a draftsman at FMC he worked on the design teams for the M-5G Tank.

Even as a draftsman, John was deeply involved in the heart of any problem. The extent of this fact was brought to light when he was in the hospital recuperating from a minor foot industry. His manager discovered that only John really understood the full design. So, “instead of candy and flowers, John received drawings.” And in his true spirit worked happily away on the problem while sitting in bed.

FMC had an amphibious vehicle known as ‘Beulah’ which had been plagued with power train problems. John took two standard Cadillac engines with hydromatic transitions and through a clever selector mechanism design, developed a reliable drive train for the amphibious vehicle. He also worked on modifications to the LVT. He did work on a cantaloupe picker and a peach pitter as well.

John was noted for the aesthetic, architectural quality drafting skills. His ability to conceptualize an idea on paper was unsurpassed. His modesty happy go-lucky and personality betrayed his sharp intellect.

The RAMAC 350 and Beyond Upon joining IBM, Lynott was put on the development of a large memory device. Magnetic tapes and drums which had been used for many years were not suitable for large memories and the concept of multiple magnetic-coated discs was developed. The key engineering problem that John faced was how to move the head so that magnetic information could be read from the disc surfaces. As the mechanical system architect, he designed the access mechanism for both the original prototype and the final production unit.

The initial prototype machine was awarded U.S. Patent #3,134,097. John developed the mechanical portions of the machine and co-inventors L.D. Stevens and W.A. Goddard worked on the electronics.

The final unit, the IBM 350 RAMAC utilized an ingenious cable and reversing clutch drive to move the head assembly vertically from disc to disc and horizontally across the disc surface. A single cable powered both the X and Y motions. To assure that the head was correctly located vertically before it began moving horizontally an interlock mechanism was provided. The access time to any of the 100 data tracks on any of the 50 discs was less than one second. John’s access mechanism for the 350 RAMAC machine was awarded U.S. Patent #2,925,238.

John continued his efforts in magnetic disc memories and was awarded three more patents for an access mechanism and floating design heads. Several of his ideas were published in the IBM Technical Disclosure Bulleting.

To appreciate the significance of these contributions, it must be remembered that the 350 RAMAC was the first commercially successful random access disc memory. In a few short years, the RAMAC’s magnetic disc concept was to give birth to a major computer technology. The result is today’s familiar disc memories which store roughly half of the world’s computer information.

Stanford University had been developing some concepts for using the computer to teach children mathematics. Since this was a completely new field, there was a need for a machine which would be the user interface between the child and the computer. The concept of a teaching terminal arose, and system guidelines were set.

The teaching terminal stored 512, 8/1/2 x 11 images on microfilm and contained two projectors. Any image could be selected and shown to the student with a time delay of less than one second the images could be merged on the screen or the screen could be divided into eight separately controlled segments. A highly sensitive pen could be touched to any area of the screen and its positions relayed to a computer.

John had the task of designing a safe and dependable terminal that could be used by students of all ages. He assembled the various functional units, designed the microfilm transport mechanism and carefully integrated the multitude of optical and electro-mechanical components into a functional package. The result was an aesthetic terminal that was completely unique in form. The terminal was awarded U.S. Patent #3,277,588. John was responsible for the mechanical-optical portions of the terminal and co-inventor R.C. Treseder was responsible for the electronics.

John was awarded a separate patent #3,345,460 for a unique scanning apparatus used in the teaching terminal. Co-inventor P. Betts contributed to the optics technician. The access mechanism for the film chips was published in the IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin. The terminal became IBM 9405.

The success of the first terminal encouraged IBM to investigate the area of computer instruction further and now major projects continue to carry on this work.

John continued to work in the area of magnetic memories and developed a Random Access Magnetic Air Drum along with electronic engineer Bruce Edwards. This work is described in A D1-D8.

John worked with electronics engineer, Hal Martin, on two novel concepts for the use of amorphous selenium. The first of these was a parallel to serial card image converter using electronic readback from the card image recorded on the selenium drum through glass exposure. The idea was that the image of the card and its holes would be flashed on the selenium surface at such a rate of exposure that the card would essentially be frozen on the drum surface. It would then be read back from the drum through a series of electrostatic probes near the surface of the drum reading the card such that the image was moving in a serial fashion. The second concept concerned the use of the same selenium surface in a black check posting machine. The idea here was to elminiate the paper document or check from the system just as soon as possible. The image of the checks were to be exposed onto the sleneum surface in somewhat a reduced fashion. The surface was then dusted with conventional toner particles. Specular reflection was then used off of the selenium surface from a high intensity ultraviolet source down in a further reduction on the Calvar film. The Calvar film was then posted with the pertinent variable information describing the transaction. The final statement issued to the bank customer would then, of course, be the photographic record of each of his/her checks along with today’s convention posting information. John contributed a great deal of the conceptual design of the various mechanisms that went into the final configuration of this machine U.S. Patent #2,983,444 was awarded for the basic concepts of this banking machine.

John worked on developing the basic concepts for the X-Y platting machine. The result of this work resulted in a machine patent, #2,857,03. However, John, himself, received a separate patent for his work on the access mechanism (Appendix J9).

John was continually active in the field of terminals and received a patent and several technical disclosure publications.

His work in hydraulics produced another patent and serval technical disclosures.

John was heavily involved in the mechanical conception and design of another memory system known as DAP. This Direct Access Photomemory used “self-developing” or print-out film to scout over one billion characters or the equivalent in image form.

The features were: Direct Access in one second or less, the ability to add new information at any time, storage of information on both human readable and machine-readable form, and elimination of the need for buffer storage or synchronization. This latter feature allowed true modular or unitized design in a data process machine.

The fundamental nature of John’s contributions to this new memory device can be appreciated by the fact that he was awarded six patents. Co-inventors on these patents were J.M. Harker (mechanical engineer), F.A. Litz (electrical) and D.D. Laine (electrical). Some of John’s further concepts in this machine were published in IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin.

Again, John was involved in the concept of a machine that was the beginning of a new technology. The most recent development in this area was the delivery to the Lawrence Radiation Laboratories of two random access photo memories. These devices each hold 1 trillion bits of information and are the largest memories in existence.

In addition to his work on creating new machines, John was a frustrated architect and completely designed a unique five-level home and in the hills of Los Gatos. Not only did he design the home, he did a good portion of the physical construction single-handedly.

John was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame in 2007 along with his colleague William Goddard.