Shugart Associates

Alan Shugart had worked on disk storage at IBM and Memorex before going it alone in 1973. He was pushed out of his own company the following year, but his name stayed on the door. In 1976 came the SA-400, a 5¼-inch minifloppy developed after Wang Laboratories asked for something smaller than the 8-inch format. It became the standard drive in home computers and early PCs, and its 34-pin interface was copied by almost every other floppy maker.

In 1981 Shugart Associates published SASI, a hard disk interface that was standardised as SCSI in 1986. By then Xerox owned the company, and it closed it down in the mid-1980s. Alan Shugart had long since moved on and founded Seagate.