Shugart Associates

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Shugart Associates was a manufacturer and developer company of computer peripherals in Sunnyvale , California which mid-1970s the 5¼- inches - floppy system under the trademark mini floppy in the market introduced and dominated the market for 5¼-inch floppy disk drives in the following years. At the time, larger 8-inch floppy disk systems were common.

Shugart Associates was founded in 1973 by Alan Shugart and led by him until 1977. In 1977 the company was sold to Xerox , in 1979 Alan Shugart left the company. In 1980 the company was renamed Shugart Corporation , and in 1985 Xerox sold the Shugart Corporation to the Narlinger Group , which continued to operate the company under the name Shugart until the early 1990s.

Shugart SA-400 5¼-inch full-height floppy disk drive

history

Alan Shugart had a 1973 business plan to use venture capital to build a computer system similar to the IBM-3740 system from IBM . In order to be competitive, he wanted to develop the necessary components such as printers or floppy drives himself at a lower cost and then produce them. However, even two years later, he was unable to present a fully functional system, which is why the donors asked him against his will to market functional components such as floppy disk drives as individual OEM components . This resulted in the first 5¼-inch floppy disk drive with the designation SA-400 in September 1976 , which became the company's greatest success in the following years. The drive sold for $ 390 in late 1976, when ten 5¼-inch disks were priced at $ 45.

The first 5¼-inch disks had a capacity of 109,400  bytes unformatted and 89,600 bytes formatted. Initially the format was implemented with 35  tracks per diskette, a year later Shugart switched to 40 tracks. As an electrical interface, the drives have 34 pins in the form of a circuit board connector and are designed to control a maximum of four disk drives on a floppy disk controller . This type of interface with a 34-pin connector was the common interface until the end of the floppy disk drive era and was also known as the Shugart bus .

In addition to floppy disk drives, the Shugart Corporation developed the electrical interface "Shugart Associates System Interface" (SASI) for mass storage devices such as hard drives in 1979, which was renamed in 1981 to the name Small Computer System Interface (SCSI), which is still used today . In 1986 this interface was standardized, with minor modifications, as the ANSI standard X3.131-1986 (colloquially SCSI-1 ).

Web links

Commons : Shugart Minifloppy  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ IBM 3740 IBM Archives.
  2. ↑ Shugart Adds Minifloppy Drive in Computerworld , Sep. 13, 1976, p. 51.
  3. ↑ Oral History Panel on 5.25 and 3.5 inch Floppy Drives (PDF; 123 kB), Jim Porter, 2005.
  4. ↑ Sollman, G. Evolution of the mini floppy (TM) product family IEEE Transactions on Magnetics July 1978th