[5] He was encouraged in this work by Dennis Bus[6] who was also a visiting scientist at MIT and by Dean Toombs, the VP in charge of bubbles at TI[7] In 1981, Fontana joined the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, to work on thin film magnetic recording heads.

[10] Fontana's colleagues and collaborators included Ta Lin Hsu, Ching Tsang, Christopher Bajorek, Heiner Sussner, Prakash Kasiraj, Bob Scranton, Rick Dill.

[1][11] In 2008, Fontana re-joined the IBM Almaden Research Center to work on heads for magnetic tape recording.

[1] In particular he contributed to the development and implementation of TMR read heads suitable for the harsh tape recording environment.

In particular, he played an influential role with the IEEE Magnetics Society encouraged by Denis Mee, Mark Kryder, and Dave Thompson.

Several more recent publications address the status and outlook comparing solid-state, optical, HDD and tape storage technologies[13][24]