Shugart Associates
Shugart Associates (later Shugart Corporation) was a computer peripheral manufacturer that dominated the floppy disk drive market in the late 1970s and is famous for introducing the -inch "Minifloppy" floppy disk drive. In 1979 it was one of the first companies to introduce a hard disk drive form factor compatible with a floppy disk drive, the SA1000 form factor compatible with the 8-inch floppy drive form factor. Founded in 1973, Shugart Associates was purchased in 1977 by Xerox, which then exited the business in 1985 and 1986, selling the brand name and the 8-inch floppy product line (in March 1986) to Narlinger Group, which ultimately ceased operations circa 1991. Alan Shugart, after a distinguished career at IBM and a few years at Memorex, 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 SA-400 Minifloppy (Shugart's trademarked brand name) at an OEM price of 45 for ten diskettes. The SA-400 and related models became the company's best selling products, with shipments of up to 4000 drives per day. The original SA-400 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.
