R.I.P. Al Shugart, Disk Drive Pioneer

By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

No one would think of buying a home PC without a hard drive today, but Al Shugart had trouble finding funding for his first hard drive, a 5 MB (yes, that’s megabyte, not the gigabytes we talk about today) model. Why? Because no one thought anyone would need that much storage. This pioneer of hard drive technology passed away earlier this week at the age of 76.

He (Shugart) quickly rose to the position of Direct Access Storage Product Manager, in charge of IBM’s disk drive products—IBM was an innovator in hard drive technology at the time. In 1961, he helped IBM create the world’s first hard drive, the Advanced Disk File, which later became known as the IBM 1301. Source: Ars Technica

We Say: Shugart founded Seagate Technology in 1979, and I’m sure that’s a name most of you are familiar with. Many of you readers have a Seagate drive in your PC. Those of us with disk drives with hundreds of gigabytes of storage, we owe a lot to Al. May he rest in peace.