Alan Shugart
Alan Field Shugart was an American engineer, entrepreneur and business executive whose career defined the modern computer disk drive industry.
Personal history
Born in Los Angeles, he graduated from the University of Redlands, receiving a degree in engineering physics.Shugart was the father of three children: Joanne Shugart, Christopher D. Shugart and Teri L.K. Shugart. Shugart was married to Esther Marrs, the mother of his three children, from 1951 until 1973. He was married to Rita Shugart from 1981 until his death.
Shugart died at age 76 on December 12, 2006, in Monterey, California, of complications from heart surgery he had undergone six weeks earlier.
Career
He began his career in 1951 as a field engineer at IBM. In 1955, he transferred to the IBM San Jose laboratory where he worked on the IBM 305 RAMAC. He rose through a series of increasingly important positions to become the Direct Access Storage Product Manager, responsible for disk storage products, IBM's most profitable businesses at that time. Among the groups reporting to Shugart was the team that invented the floppy disk.Shugart joined Memorex in 1969 as Vice President of its Equipment Division and led the development of its 3660 and 3670 disk storage subsystems. His team also developed the Memorex 650, one of the first commercially available floppy disk drives.
He founded Shugart Associates in February 1973 and resigned as CEO in October 1974. The company was later acquired by Xerox. Then he and Finis Conner started Shugart Technology in 1979, which soon changed its name to Seagate Technology.
In 1991, Shugart resumed his tenure as CEO of Seagate. Seagate went on to become the world’s largest independent manufacturer of disk drives and related components. In July 1998, Shugart resigned his positions with Seagate.