David A. Thompson is an American electrical engineer and inventor with a long career at IBM.

[7] Thompson's innovations head technology have enabled and maintained the exponential increases in data storage areal-density (and decreasing cost per Byte) that have characterized tape-drives and hard disk drives for the last 50 years or more - sometimes referred to as Kryder's Law.

[citation needed] In 1965, Thompson became an assistant professor of Electrical Engineering at Carnegie Institute of Technology.

The latter did become a commercial success and hand-held card or stripe readers became widespread[8] Subsequently, a major breakthrough occurred when Thompson and the team developed a practical magnetoresistive read head for magnetic recording.

[6] As a result of this work, in 1980, Thompson was named an IBM Fellow, the company's highest technical honor.

Thompson was also a founding member of the Technical Advisory Board of the Magnetics Technology Centre (became Data Storage Institute) at the National University of Singapore.

He also served on the advisory board of the Data Storage Systems Center (DSSC) at Carnegie Mellon University.