In 1955 at IBM, Alan Shugart was a member of the team that developed the world’s first hard drive, the IBM RAMAC, which stored about five megabytes on fifty 24-inch platters. He also directed the development of the first floppy disk drive. Upon leaving IBM, he cofounded Shugart Associates to manufacture floppy disk drives for OEM use.

In 1979 he founded Shugart Technology, which in 1980 introuced the ST-506, the first 5.25 inch hard disk. It had the same five megabyte storage capacity as the RAMAC in about 0.12% of the volume. The company was later renamed to Seagate Technology, and became the world’s largest manufacturer of disk drives.