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A History of Silicon Valley

This biography is an appendix to my book "A History of Silicon Valley"

Biographies | History pages | Editor | Correspondence

Alan Shugart

Alan Shugart (California, 1930) grew up in Los Angeles and graduated in physics from the University of Redlands. He joined IBM in 1951 as a technician for punch card machines. In 1955 he was transferred to IBM's San Jose lab working on the first disk drive, the RAMAC 305, which IBM started selling in 1959. He eventually became the manager of a group in charge of storage media. He left in 1969 to join Memorex, taking with him dozens of IBM engineers. In 1971 his former employee David Noble came up with a cheap read-only 80-kilobyte diskette: it was nicknamed the "floppy disk". One year later Shugart at Memorex built the first read-write floppy-disk drive, the Memorex 650. He founded Shugart Associates in 1973. In 1976 Wang commissioned them a smaller disk and Shugart delivered the 5 1/4" flexible diskette. He was ejected from Shugart Associates in 1974 (the company was

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Introduction by Al Hoagland

I have the great privilege of introducing Al Shugart as our luncheon speaker. I had the opportunity to work for him for a brief period in the early days of the disk drive. You have a copy of his biography, which is included in the Conference presentation material we provided. Al is so well known that he truly falls in that category of individuals that really need no introduction. so I am not going to restate that background information. In reading the material he submitted there were two items in particular that really caught my attention.

One had to do with the statement that he was the program manager of the IBM 2321 data cell program. Given his many major accomplishments I am not sure why this was included, given that the product had both a limited success and a limited life. I showed a picture of this device in my talk. If you also have a question I refer you to Al who may provide an answer in his talk. The second item I will mention is one I would like to elaborate upon. In his biography it states Al Shugart "is renowned for his unconventi

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Memorial Tributes: Volume 12 (2008)

the Seagate Institute of Technology to spread Silicon Valley engineering and manufacturing skills worldwide.

As the data-storage industry matured, Al foresaw that research would become increasingly critical. He was a founder of the Center for Magnetic Recording Research at the University of California at San Diego and a major research and education center at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

He left Seagate in July 1998 to run his own company, Al Shugart International, an incubator for start-up companies.

Al campaigned for the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, which outlawed frivolous lawsuits and limited securities-fraud class actions against corporate executives.

In his long career, Al won many awards. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1997. Also in 1997, IEEE honored him with the Rey Johnson Award for the advancement of information storage technology. In 2005, he became a fellow of IEEE for his lifelong contributions to the disk-drive industry. In 2005, he was also made a fell