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Alan Shugart (b. 1930 in Los Angeles) is a leading engineer/executive in the disk drive industry. He began his career at IBM in San Jose, CA, and rose through a series of increasingly important positions to become the Direct Access Storge Product Manager, the business person in IBM responsible for its disk storage products—IBM's most profitable business at that time. Among the several groups reporting to Al was the team that invented the floppy disk. He was the founder of Shugart Associates in 1973, later acquired by Xerox. Then he and Finis Conner started Shugart Technology in 1979, which soon changed its name to Seagate Technology. This article is about the largest city in California. ...
A floppy disk is a data storage device that is composed of a ring of thin, flexible (i. ...
Shugart Associates was a computer peripheral manufacturer, famous for introducing the floppy disk to the microcomputer market. ...
Seagate Technology NYSE: STX is a major manufacturer of hard drives, founded in 1979 and based in Scotts Valley, California. ...
Alan Shugart is generally credited with inventing the floppy drive while working for IBM in the late 1960s. In 1967, he headed the disk drive development team at IBM's San Jose lab, when and where the floppy drive was created. One of Shugart's senior engineers, David Noble, actually proposed the flexible media (then 8 inches in diameter) and the protective jacket with the fabric lining. Shugart left IBM in 1969, and took more than 100 IBM engineers with him to Memorex. He was nicknamed "The Pied Piper" because of the loyalty exhibited by the many staff members who followed him. In 1973, he left Memorex, again taking with him a number of associates, and started Shugart Associates to develop and manufacture floppy drives. The floppy interface developed by Shugart is still the basis of all PC floppy drives. IBM used this interface in the PC, enabling them to use off-the-shelf third-party drives instead of custom building their own solutions.
Shugart wanted to incorporate processors and floppy drives into complete microcomputer systems at that time, but the financial backers of the new Shugart Associates wanted him to concentrate on floppy drives only. He quit (or was forced to quit) Shugart Associates in 1974, right before they introduced the mini-floppy (5 1/4-inch) diskette drive, which of course became the standard eventually used by personal computers, rapidly replacing the 8-inch drives. Shugart Associates also introduced the Shugart Associates System Interface (SASI), which was later renamed Small Computer Systems Interface (SCSI) when it was formally approved by the ANSI committee in 1986. After being forced to leave, Shugart attempted to legally force Shugart Associates to remove his name from the company, but failed. The remnants of Shugart Associates still operates today as Shugart Corporation.
For the next few years, Shugart took time off, ran a bar, and even dabbled in commercial fishing. In 1979, Finis Conner approached Shugart to create and market 5 1/4-inch hard disk drives. Together they founded Seagate Technology and by the end of 1979 had announced the ST-506 (6M unformatted, 5M formatted capacity) drive and interface. This drive is known as the father of all PC hard disk drives. Seagate then introduced the ST-412 (12M unformatted, 10M formatted capacity) drive, which was adopted by IBM for the original XT in 1983. IBM was Seagate's largest customer for many years. Today, Seagate Technology is the largest disk drive manufacturer in the world.
When you stop to think about it, Alan Shugart has had a tremendous effect on the PC industry. He (or his companies) has created the floppy, hard disk, and SCSI drive and controller interfaces still used today. All PC floppy drives are still based on (and compatible with) the original Shugart designs. The ST-506/412 interface was the de facto hard disk interface standard for many years and served as the basis for the ESDI and IDE interfaces as well. Shugart also created the SCSI interface, used in both IBM and Apple systems today.
As a side note, in the late 80s Finis Conner left Seagate and founded Conner Peripherals, originally wholly owned and funded by Compaq. Conner became Compaq's exclusive drive supplier, and gradually began selling drives to other system manufacturers as well. Compaq eventually cut Conner Peripherals free, selling off most (if not all) of their ownership of the company. In late 1996, Seagate bought Conner Peripherals, and has fully incorporated all of the Conner products into the Seagate line.
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