Beginnings After a distinguished career at
IBM and a few years at
Memorex,
Alan Shugart decided to strike out on his own in 1973. After gathering
venture capital, he started Shugart Associates. The original business plan was to build a small-business system (similar to the
IBM 3740) dealing with the development of various major components, including floppy disk drives and printers. After two years, Shugart had exhausted his startup money and had no product to show for it. The board then wanted to focus on the floppy disk drive, but Shugart wished to continue the original plan. Official company documents state that Shugart quit, but he himself claims that he was fired by the venture capitalists. Shugart went on with
Finis Conner to found Shugart Technology in 1979, which was later renamed to
Seagate Technology in response to a legal challenge by Xerox. The -inch floppy disk drive was introduced by Shugart in September 1976 as the Shugart SA400 Minifloppy (Shugart's
trademarked
brand name) at an OEM price of $390 for the drive and $45 for ten diskettes. The SA400 and related models became the company's best selling products, with shipments of up to 4000 drives per day. The original SA400 was single-sided with 35-tracks and used
FM (single density) recording. It could be used on either
hard- or
soft-sector floppy controllers and was specified at 80.6 kB with a soft sectored controller. The drive became the basis of the disk system on the
Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I,
Apple II, and many other early
microcomputers.
Late 1970s Xerox announced acquisition of Shugart Associates in August 1977 and completed its purchase that December at a price of about $41 million. In 1979, Shugart Associates introduced the "Shugart Associates System Interface" (SASI) to the computing world; the interface subsequently evolved into
SCSI (Small Computer System Interface). The first standard process completed in 1986 with
ANSI standard
X3.131-1986 (popularly known as
SCSI-1) as the result. Larry Boucher led the SASI engineering team; he and several of the engineers who worked on SASI left in 1981 to found
host adapter maker
Adaptec. Also in 1979, Shugart Associates introduced the SA-1000, a series of
hard disk drives that kept as many mechanical, electrical and formatting similarities as possible with its floppy-drive counterparts. Their physical dimensions, including mounting holes, were the same as an 8-inch floppy drive, making them some of the earliest hard drives compatible with a floppy drive
form factor. By 1983, Shugart Associates had shipped over 100,000 such drives.
1980s In the early 1980s, in order to avoid development and start-up costs, the company turned to Matsushita Communications Inc., a subsidiary of
Panasonic Corporation (then known as Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd), for its half-height -inch drives, sending that company on its way to becoming the largest floppy drive manufacturer in the world. In 1985, in order to resolve an inventory accumulation and as part of its exit strategy, Xerox gave up Shugart's exclusive rights to the Matsushita half-height -inch floppy drives. Shugart's eventual downfall came about partially as a result of the company failing to develop a reliable 80-track disk drive. In 1983 the company changed its name to Shugart Corporation. In late 1983, Shugart announced a "production-quantity
optical drive", the Optimem 1000, offering 1 GB of storage on 12-inch disks using a laser-based recording technology, taking advantage of a substantially increased track density compared to contemporary magnetic recording technologies. The process of recording involved focusing the laser beam on the metal layer of the disk, this causing a "decomposable polymer" layer underneath to generate "gaseous components" and to push up on the metal layer, forming a bubble. This deformation would cause a change in the intensity of the reflected light from a laser reading the disk, thus providing a means of data storage. Initial
OEM pricing for the drive was given as $6,000 per unit in 250-unit quantities with disks priced about $ each (UK price). Optimem was sold to Cipher Data in 1986 who then discontinued operations in 1991. Most of Shugart's businesses were shut down afterwards; however its floppy disk drive business was sold in March 1986 to Narlinger, which promptly rebranded itself as Shugart Corporation In 1987, it acquired
Kennedy Company, a maker of
tape drives and hard disks, from
Allegheny Ludlum. Shugart shortly after sold Kennedy's assets to
Irwin Magnetic Systems, who promptly folded the Kennedy division while retaining its patents. Shugart themselves ceased operations around 1991. ==See also==