Alan Shugart
Alan F. Shugart ( born September 27, 1930 in Los Angeles, † December 12, 2006 in San José ) was an American engineer, the invention of the floppy disk is attributed.
Shugart studied physics and engineering at the University of Redlands with a bachelor's degree in 1951. Afterwards he went to IBM as an engineer in customer service. He led IBM a number of development programs for magnetic disk storage, including the Ramac Project, the first commercial computer with a hard disk. Shugart was Manager of Direct Access Storage at IBM and was in its development center in San Jose. He was also head of the working group that developed 1969 8 "diskette (floppy disk ). In 1969, he left IBM and went to Memorex. In 1973 he founded his own company, Shugart Associates, where he perfected the floppy disk and floppy disk drives for the mass market. In 1974, he left in a dispute Shugart Associates. He took a break, set up a bar and worked with friends as a fisherman with own salmon fishing boat. In 1979 he founded together with Finis Conner purchased Seagate (initially as Fini Conner Shugart Technology), a leading manufacturer of hard drives.
Shugart developed, not only the disk, but also in Shugart Associates the Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) for connecting of optical and magnetic disk drives on the computer. Initially it was called Shugart Associates System Interface ( SASI ), later, when it received the support of companies such as NCR and Adaptec SCSI.
The term Shugart is also used for the de - facto standard for floppy disk drive interfaces:
In 1998 he gave up the position of Chief Executive Officer ( CEO) at Seagate.
He was a Fellow of the Computer History Museum and was awarded the IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Systems Award.
Shugart was married twice - his first marriage he had three children. He died in 2006 in a California hospital from complications of heart surgery.
He also founded a restaurant in Pacific Grove, a small airline, a ladies clothing store and a small publishing house.