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Alan Field Shugart (September 27, 1930 – December 12, 2006) was a leading computer engineer working in the disk drive industry. He was widely considered a pioneer of the disk drive.

Born in Los Angeles, California, he graduated from the University of Redlands^[1], receiving a degree in engineering physics. He began his career at IBM in San Jose, California. He worked on the IBM RAMAC, and rose through a series of increasingly important positions to become the Direct Access Storage Product Manager, responsible for its disk storage products. Those were IBM's most profitable business at that time. Among the groups reporting to Shugart 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. "(Shugart's) first disk drive had five megabytes. He couldn't get any money then because nobody thought the world would ever need five megabytes of storage. Here's a guy who thought you not only needed five megs, but you would ultimately need a whole lot more. And he was right," Seagate chief executive Bill Watkins told Los Angeles Times reporter Alex Pham.

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.^[2]

In 1996 he launched an unsuccessful campaign to elect Ernest, his Bernese Mountain Dog to Congress. Shugart later wrote about that experience in a book, Ernest Goes to Washington (Well, Not Exactly). He backed a failed ballot initiative in 2000 to give California voters the option of choosing "none of the above" in elections.^[3]

Shugart died on December 12, 2006 in San José, California of complications from heart surgery he had undergone six weeks earlier.^[4]

1. ^ [1]
2. ^ Separation agreement and release, Exh 10.14 to Seagate 10K for fiscal year ending July 3, 1998. United States Securities and Exchange Commission (20 August 1998). Retrieved on 2006-12-14.
3. ^ A.F. Shugart, 76, co-founded key disk-drive company. Los Angeles Times (14 December 2006). Retrieved on 2006-12-14.
4. ^ Disk drive pioneer Al Shugart dies. Yahoo! (13 December 2006). Retrieved on 2006-12-14.

• Al Shugart Official Site
• Al Shugart biography at Computer History Museum
• Al Shugart milestones at Computer History Museum
• Alan Shugart - NNDB

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