Seagate

(Seagate Technology, Inc., Scotts Valley, CA, www.seagate.com) The largest independent manufacturer of disk drives. Founded in 1979 by Alan Shugart, Tom Mitchell and Doug Mahon, it was the first to offer a 5MByte drive using 5.25" platters making it ideal for the burgeoning desktop computer industry. Seagate became the first company to ship 10 million drives.

In 1989, it acquired Imprimis Technology, a CDC subsidiary making workstation and mainframe drives, nearly doubling Seagate's revenue to $2.5 billion. In 1996, it acquired Conner Peripherals bringing combined revenues to more than eight billion dollars. Starting in the mid-1990s, Seagate acquired several software companies and formed Seagate Software subsidiaries in Europe and the U.S. Seagate Software provides products for asset, network, storage and information management. In 2006, Seagate acquired Maxtor Corporation, a rival hard disk manufacturer founded in 1982, and turned it into a Seagate subsidiary.

The ST506

Introduced in 1979, Seagate's ST506 was the first hard disk drive for personal computers. This 5.25" full-height drive held 5MB and became an industry standard used in CP/M machines and, later, the IBM PC and its successors. (Image courtesy of Seagate Technology, Inc.)