Alan Shugart
Technology Executive
The next time you download all 895 photos you took on that recent vacation onto your computer disk drive, give a little thanks to Alan Shugart, who died Dec. 12 at age 76.
Shugart was a colorful Silicon Valley entrepreneur who helped establish the multimillion-dollar hard drive industry—co-founding hard drive maker Seagate Technology in 1979 at a time when personal computers were first beginning to make their mark. "The first Seagate drive was 5 megabytes, and no one believed that anyone would need 5 megabytes of storage," Seagate CEO Bill Watkins told the Associated Press recently. "But (Shugart) kept saying, 'People are going to need storage.'"