The Dal Allan collection ranges in date from 1970 to 1997 and holds documentation pertaining to mass storage and disk drives. About half of the collection consists of conference and forum proceedings from data storage conferences between 1987 and 1996. About a quarter of the collection consists of storage industry market studies and forecasts published between 1988 and 1992 by groups such as IDEMA, Technology Forums, International Data Corporation (IDC), and Peripheral Research Corporation. The last fourth of the collection is made up of printed materials related to data storage, including technical reports, specifications, manuals, clippings, promotional material, and periodicals.

Dal Allan is president of ENDL Consulting and specializes in peripheral interfaces, especially storage. Allan grew up in Australia and at the age of 19, went to work for International Business Machines (IBM) in 1960 while earning his bachelor's degree in Economics. He worked in the systems department, where he learned to program and became one of the four people who wrote the original disk operating system for the System 360. In 1969 he transferred to IBM in San Jose, California. He then left IBM and worked at Information Storage Systems (ISS) for much of the 1970s. Allan was very active in the disk drive industry, taking leadership roles in developing disk drive and storage interface standards. For example, he was involved in the development of SCSI and Fibre Channel standards. Allan was also on the Small Form Factor Committee, now known as the SFF Committee, which was formed in 1990 to develop interoperability specifications as a complement to the traditional standards committee process. In 1984, Allan started an organization called ENDL Inc., a consulting firm specializing in computer interfaces. For over twenty years, the company published a newsletter, ENDL Letter, to provide inside information on storage technology developments. Allan is a member of the Storage Special Interest Group committee at the Computer History Museum.

9.5 Linear feet, 7 record cartons and 1 periodical box

The Computer History Museum (CHM) can only claim physical ownership of the collection. Users are responsible for satisfying any claims of the copyright holder. Requests for copying and permission to publish, quote, or reproduce any portion of the Computer History Museum's collection must be obtained jointly from both the copyright holder (if applicable) and the Computer History Museum.

The collection is open for research.