Shugart Associates

Shugart Associates was a manufacturer and developer company of computer peripherals in Sunnyvale, California introduced which mid-1970s the 5 ¼ -inch floppy disk system under the brand name minifloppy on the market and in the following years, the market for 5 ¼ -inch -dominated disk drives. At the time, larger 8 -inch floppy systems were common.

Shugart Associates was founded in 1973 by Alan Shugart and led by him until 1977. In 1977 the company was sold to Xerox in 1979 Alan Shugart resigned from the Company. In 1980 the company is renamed Shugart Corporation, Xerox 1985 sold the Shugart Corporation to the Narlinger Group, which until the early 1990s continue operating the company under the name Shugart.

Alan Shugart had with venture capital to build the business plan in 1973, a similar computer system such as the IBM 3740 system from IBM. He wanted to be competitive, but even develop necessary components such as printers and disk drives cost-effective and produce in a row. However, he could also present two years later, no functioning system as a whole, which is why donors urged him against his will to commercialize functional components such as disk drives as OEM single component. It was created in September 1976, the first 5 ¼ - inch floppy drive with the designation SA -400 which was in the following years, the biggest success of the company. The drive was sold in late 1976 at a price of 390 U.S. $, the price of ten 5 ¼ -inch floppy disks that time was 45 U.S. $.

The first 5 ¼ -inch disks had a capacity of 109,400 bytes unformatted and formatted 89,600 bytes. First, the format with 35 tracks per disk was realized a year later by Shugart switching to 40 tracks. As an electric interface, the drives have pins 34 in the form of a platinum plug and is set out for the control of a maximum of four disk drives to a floppy disk controller. This form of the interface with 34 -pin connector has been the standard interface to the end of the era of floppy drives and was also referred to as " Shugart bus".

In addition to floppy drives the company Shugart Corporation developed the electric interface " Shugart Associates System Interface " ( SASI ) for mass storage such as hard disks, which in 1981 the still customary designation Small Computer System Interface was renamed (SCSI) in 1979. In 1986, those interface, with minor modifications, as ANSI standard X3.131 - 1986 ( colloquially SCSI -1) was standardized.