Horst L. Truestedt joined IBM in Rochester, MN in 1968 after conducting physics research for six years at the 3M Company in St. Paul, MN. He has worked in several divisions of IBM (including Germany, Japan, and Holland) in system and storage architecture and as a manager.

Before retiring from IBM in 1997, Truestedt had been involved with DASD interfaces and attachment architecture. He represented IBM for 12 years at ANSI T11- Intelligent Peripheral Interface (IPI), High Performance Parallel Interface (HIPPI), Fibre Channel (FC), and Enterprise System Connectivity (SBCON); represented IBM SSD on the Fibre Channel Association (FCA); represented IBM on the Redundant Array of Independent Disk (RAID) Advisory Board; represented ANSI T11 at the International Standards Organization (ISO): and, consulted for large IBM systems worldwide.

Truestedt attended Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN in pre-Engineering and received a BS in Physics and Mathematics from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
Truestedt is the President/CEO of TrueFocus, Inc., which is a consulting firm focusing on industry Fibre Channel and Storage Product implementations.

While at IBM and since retiring, Truestedt has lectured and made presentations at many Storage and Interface conferences and at main computer suppliers.