Johnny L. Teale's Obituary
John Teale was born December 15, 1954 in Alexandria, Louisiana and passed away peacefully in his home in Tucson, AZ on May 7, 2023.
John spent the majority of his childhood and early adulthood in Albuquerque, NM, graduating from Highland High School in 1972, and earning his bachelors and masters degrees from the University of New Mexico in 1976 and 1978. He moved to Tucson after graduating from UNM and was one of the first 100 people in the IBM Tucson plant. He was influential in IBMs tape business, took 32 trips to Japan and saw the world, has many recordings at the Computer History Museum, and he would tell you to “Google that sh*t” if you want to learn more. One of John Teale’s most significant contributions to IBM was the commercialization of the data storage product line called Linear Tape Open (LTO). Under John’s direction, starting in 1990, IBM Tucson funded prototyping and eventual development of the technologies critical for the success of LTO: time-based servo, longitudinal position encoding, flexure-based actuators, flat head-to-tape interfaces, and adaptation of three generations of film-based magnetoresistive disk heads. John also played a key role in establishing the industry wide LTO consortium. By 2019 LTO outstripped all competitors’ capabilities and ever since maintained 100 percent market share of the data archiving market.
He is survived by his wife Chris Teale, daughter Rikki (Steve) Bellinger, son Brad Teale, Terry Teale, sisters Cindy Harris and Rami Gallegos, step-sons Dylan Telford and Kyle Telford, grandchildren Cora, Marvin and Lucy, Tuxie the cat and Mack the tortoise. John was an avid Kansas City Chiefs, Arizona Diamondbacks, and UNM Lobo fan. In lieu of flowers donations to the University of New Mexico College of Engineering scholarship fund.
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