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For his lifelong contributions to the creation of the modern disk drive industry.
"It is important to remember when starting and growing a new company that cash is more important than your mother." |
Al Shugart began his career at IBM in 1951 as a field engineer immediately after graduating from the University of Redlands with a B.S. in engineering physics and rose quickly through the organization as an effective leader who inspired great loyalty in his team members. Shugart contributed to or managed a number of difficult disk drive development programs over his 18-year career at IBM, including the groundbreaking RAMAC 305--IBM's first disk drive--and the legendary 1311 removable disk pack drive. Shugart rose to become director of engineering in 1969 but left that same year to become vice-president of product development at competitor Memorex.
Shugart remained at Memorex until 1972. He then launched Shugart Associates in 1972, taking several loyal followers with him, where they worked on, among other things, perfecting the eight-inch floppy disk drive as a mass-produced device. After a dispute over company direction with his board, Shugart left in 1974, moved to Santa Cruz, opened a bar with some friends, bought a fishing boat, wrote a book, and ran his dog Ernest for Congress in 1996 to protest government inefficiency and ineffectiveness.
In 1979, he and Finis Conner founded Seagate Technology with $1.5 million in start-up funding with the mission of producing hard disk drives for the personal computer market. Their first commercial product was a 5 1/4" 5-Mbyte hard disk drive that sold for $1,500 and became a major enabling technology for the PC industry. Within a decade, Seagate became the world's largest producer of disk drives, a position it holds today.
Shugart is considered by most industry analysts as one of the most influential and admired figures in the storage industry. In 1997, he won the IEEE Rey Johnson Award for the advancement of information storage technology. Shugart died December 12, 2006, in Monterey, California, as the result of complications from heart surgery.