Alan Shugart

American computer engineer

• Born: September 27, 1930
• Birthplace: Los Angeles, California
• Died: December 12, 2006
• Place of death: San Jose, California

Shugart helped develop the first disk drive at an IBM research laboratory in 1955, creating the digital storage industry that allowed for smaller computers that could store more data. He was also an entrepreneur, a restaurateur, and a political gadfly.

Primary fields: Computer science; electronics and electrical engineering

Primary inventions: Floppy disk; disk drive

Early Life

Alan Field Shugart (SHEW-gahrt) was born in Los Angeles in 1930 to Donald F. and Elizabeth Shugart. His parents divorced when he was about five years old. He and his sister were raised by a single mother who taught elementary school in the farming community of Chino, California, east of Los Angeles. As a child, he exhibited an entrepreneurial spirit, partly as a result of a perceived need to support his family. He had several newspaper routes and even published a newspaper in his home. He also ran a small bicycle repair shop under a tree in his backyard. During harvest season, he worked on several area farms. His mother taught him many life lessons, including an adage: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, all play and no work makes Jack unemployed.”

Shugart’s father, a structural engineer, remarried when the boy was quite young. While Shugart maintained a good relationship with his father, Donald spent very little time with his son. It was through one of his father’s contacts that Shugart obtained a scholarship to the University of Redlands. At Redlands, he studied four different majors, but he still graduated after four years with a degree in engineering physics. The day after graduation in 1951, he started work with International Business Machines (IBM) in Santa Monica, California, as a customer engineer. He needed the job because he was married with one child.

Life’s Work

By 1955, Shugart transferred to a small IBM research and development lab in downtown San Jose, California. The lab was tasked with developing technology to replace the stacks of punch cards used to store computer data. The research team of fifty people tested various methods for storing data on media such as magnetic tape and rotating drums. They settled on a design using twenty-four-inch magnetized disks stored on a rotating spindle. The data were stored on the disks using an arm, like those on record players, which also found and retrieved the data for the computer operator. Introduced on September 4, 1956, this first disk drive was called Random Access Method of Accounting and Control (RAMAC). It weighed about twenty pounds and was two feet high. IBM leased computers with the device for about $3,200 per month. It had very limited storage compared to more modern computers, but it could hold the same amount of data as fifty thousand punch cards.

In 1957, IBM promoted Shugart to a position managing a research team to build a better disk drive. His team developed a drive that had multiple arms for reading and writing data on magnetic disks. The new drive, the IBM 1301 disk storage unit, was about the same size as RAMAC but stored 50 million bytes of data. Due to the multiple reading and writing arms, it also could access the data at a much faster rate. The first 1301 disk storage units were introduced in June, 1961.

Shugart was eventually promoted to a higher management position, a promotion that required him to move to IBM’s headquarters in Harrison, New York. A native and lifelong Californian, he originally refused the promotion but was told he had to take it. In 1969, after spending slightly more than a week in New York, Shugart resigned as director of engineering for the Systems Development Division of IBM. Several days after Shugart resigned, Memorex hired him and he returned to California. The company wanted him to direct an engineering division to create computer peripherals. About two hundred IBM employees followed Shugart to Memorex. In 1972, he left Memorex to start his own company, Shugart Associates. The goal of this new company was to design and build floppy disk drives to allow for more portability in data storage. By 1974, the company had no product to show investors, and it ran out of money. Shugart was asked to resign, but rather than return to the computer industry, he bought a fishing boat and opened a restaurant. He also did some consulting.

Shugart returned to data storage in 1979 with the founding of Shugart Technology, later renamed Seagate Technology. With $1.5 million in funding, the company sought to produce the first hard disk drives to be used in personal computers (PCs). In May, 1980, the company introduced a 5-megabyte, 5.25-inch disk drive. The company’s first customer was Apple Computer, but in 1983 IBM included the hard disks with its PC/XT. Selling disk drives at $600 per unit, Seagate Technology earned $300 million in revenue by the end of its fifth year in operation.

In 1998, the board of directors of Seagate Technology fired Shugart as the company’s chief executive officer (CEO). The firing was the result of a restructuring at Seagate in response to a downturn in the computer industry. He founded Al Shugart International, a venture capital company that invested in technology start-ups.

In addition to his work as an entrepreneurial engineer in the computer industry, Shugart worked as a political activist. In 1996, he ran his dog Ernest for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives as a protest against the frustrating political system. He was the major financial backer of California Proposition 23 in 2000. Had it been approved by voters, the proposition would have allowed citizens the option of voting for “none of these candidates” in statewide elections. Shugart died of complications from heart surgery on December 12, 2006.

Impact

It is difficult to envision the widespread use of personal computers without the invention of the disk drive. When IBM introduced the first disk drive in 1956, the storage device used fifty 24-inch disks and had limited storage capacity. Almost twenty-five years later, Shugart’s Seagate Technology introduced the 5.25-inch drive, and customers such as Apple Computer purchased the device for its computers sold to businesses and homes.

Though he was a pioneer in the computer industry, Shugart never accepted the word “visionary” as a descriptor. He shrugged off accolades. Some of Shugart’s contemporaries called him a maverick of California’s Silicon Valley. He regularly wore Hawaiian shirts to the office, and he remarked that he felt most comfortable when working on his fishing boat or at the restaurant he co-owned. Shugart’s success came in part from an entrepreneurial drive that started in his youth. Guided by his mother, he learned the values of hard work, honesty, and humility. He also learned how to have fun, an important aspect of life as the CEO of a growing corporation. As a manager, he was respected by the members of his team. Shugart believed that personal relationships with customers, suppliers, and employees were important in building a successful company. He remarked that hiring people to staff his companies was easy and that he always tried to hire people smarter than himself.

Bibliography

Malone, Michael S. Betting It All: The Entrepreneurs of Technology. New York: Wiley, 2002. Detailed interview with Shugart for general readers. Focuses on Shugart’s development as a person and as an entrepreneur and the challenges he faced building several companies and encouraging the development of the disk drive industry.

Rogers, Everett M., and Judith K. Larsen. Silicon Valley Fever: Growth of High-Technology Culture. New York: Basic Books, 1984. Scholarly examination of the culture created during the early days of the development of Silicon Valley.

Shugart, Al. Al: The Wit and Wisdom of Al Shugart. Bandon, Oreg.: Monterey Pacific, 2002. A collection of essays, many of which were previously published in newspapers in California. They provide insight into Shugart’s business and political perspectives.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Ernest Goes to Washington (Well, Not Exactly). Carmel, Calif.: Carmel Bay, 1998. The story of Shugart’s campaign to run his dog for a seat in the House of Representatives. The book reveals his political philosophy, especially his frustration with the two-party system of politics in the United States and in California.

Silverthorne, Sean. “The Spring Doctor.” PC Week 24 (January 1994): A1. Profile of Shugart, including some of his business enterprises beyond the computer industry. The article examines the challenges of the disk drive industry and documents some of the problems Shugart faced in building Seagate.