Shugart Associates

~ the obituary ~

Two objects that were under nearly every computer of the eighties came out of this company, and its name is on neither of them. One is the 5.25 inch floppy drive. The other is SCSI.

Al Shugart had run the team at IBM in San Jose that turned the 8 inch floppy from a loading mechanism into a storage medium. He left for Memorex, then started Shugart Associates in 1973 to build drives properly. It went badly at first, he fell out with his board over the direction of the company, and by 1974 he was out of the business that carried his surname. He would not get another one going until 1979, when he and Finis Conner founded Shugart Technology, renamed Seagate after Xerox objected to the name.

The company he left behind then did the important work. Wang wanted something smaller and cheaper than an 8 inch drive, and in september 1976 Shugart Associates answered with the SA400: a 5.25 inch minifloppy at three hundred and ninety dollars, with a box of ten diskettes for forty five more. Every early personal computer that mattered took that format or a clone of it, and at peak the company was pushing four thousand drives out the door a day. The connector and the cabling conventions it defined were still being copied by other manufacturers a decade after the company stopped existing.

It closed the year after I was born, so there is no version of this where I saw the name on anything. What I saw was the inheritance. The 34-pin ribbon cable with the deliberate twist in it, and the daisy chain of SCSI devices with a terminator on the last one: both of those are a Sunnyvale company's engineering decisions, repeated for decades by people who never asked where they came from.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

Xerox announced it was buying the company in august 1977 and closed the deal that december for roughly forty one million dollars, which at the time looked like a large corporation being unusually sharp about where computing was going. Xerox had the research lab that invented most of the modern desktop and now owned the drive maker supplying the industry. For a few years the arrangement even worked.

In 1979 the company published the Shugart Associates System Interface, a way for a computer to talk to a drive without knowing anything about the drive's internals. That idea, of a bus that carries commands instead of raw head movements, is why you could later plug a scanner and a hard disk into the same chain and have both work. NCR agreed to co-develop it in october 1981 and the two of them took it to ANSI, where the committee would not put a company name on a public standard. SASI became the Small Computer System Interface, and Shugart's contribution was edited out of the acronym it had invented.

~ how it actually ended ~

Drives became a commodity, the Japanese manufacturers arrived, and margins on floppy mechanisms went to nearly nothing. Xerox had no appetite for a low-margin components business it did not know how to run, and in 1985 it decided to get out. Liquidation ran into 1986. The floppy business was sold that march to a firm called Narlinger, which promptly renamed itself Shugart Corporation and traded on the reputation until it too gave up around 1991.

So the name outlived the company by five years, attached to a business with none of the original people in it. That is a common ending for hardware firms of that era and it is still a strange one to read: the trademark kept working long after the engineering that earned it had been dispersed.

~ what got buried with it ~

Almost nothing. The formats escaped. SCSI ran the professional storage world for twenty years and its command set is still alive underneath USB mass storage and SAS, so when a phone mounts as a drive it is speaking a dialect of something written in Sunnyvale in 1979. The 5.25 inch disk carried the entire home computer era and handed its habits to the 3.5 inch disk after it.

What did die was the idea that the company making the mechanism could stay valuable. Al Shugart understood that better than anyone, which is why the second company he founded made the whole drive with the platters sealed inside and sold it under its own name. Seagate is still here. The company with his name on it has been gone for forty years.

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