Alan Shugart
Alan Shugart (b. 1930 in Los Angeles - d. December 12, 2006) 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 Storage 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. With Shugart as Chief Executive Officer, Seagate became the world’s largest independent manufacturer of disk drives and related components. In July 1998, Shugart resigned his positions with Seagate[1].
Alan Shugart passed away on December 12th, 2006 in San Jose, CA of complications from heart surgery he had undergone six weeks earlier.