R.I.P. Al Shugart, Disk Drive Pioneer
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Michael Santo of RealTechNews writes:
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.
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[tags]Al Shugart, disk drive, PC, hard drive, Direct Access Storage Product Manager, IBM, Advanced Disk File, IBM 1301, Seagate[/tags]
2 Comments
Mary Lu Wehmeier
December 21st, 2006
at 8:55pm
Chris, It’s very strange that slashdot or other major blogs even mentioned this–
Mary Lu
Karib Corner-Blog Reports » Blog Archive » R.I.P. Al Shugart, Disk Drive Pioneer
July 22nd, 2007
at 7:04pm
[...] Al Shugart, Disk Drive Pioneer December 17th, 2006 R.I.P. Al Shugart, Disk Drive PioneerNo one would think of buying a home PC without a hard drive today, but Al Shugart had troublefinding 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] [...]