American computer engineer who invented the floppy disk drive and founded Seagate, a disk drive manufacturing company. The floppy disk, which first came as an 8 inch disk and has since shrunk to a standard 3.5 inches in size, helped to make data portable for the first time, allowing files to be transported from one computer to another or to be stored in a separate location. Shugart also invented the disk drive interface that remains the industry standard.