Finis Conner

Last updated
Finis F. Conner
Born (1943-07-28) July 28, 1943 (age 81)
Gadsden, Alabama, United States
Alma mater San Jose State University
Occupation(s)Salesman, Entrepreneur
Employer(s) Memorex
Shugart Associates
Seagate Technology
Conner Peripherals

Finis Conner (born July 28, 1943) is an American entrepreneur and pioneer of the disk drive industry, [1] founding industry leaders Shugart Associates, Seagate Technology, and Conner Peripherals. Conner Peripherals, a major HDD manufacturer, was founded in 1987, and by 1990 had become the fastest-growing start-up in the history of U.S. commerce up until that point. Conner Peripherals was acquired by Seagate in 1996.

Contents

Background

Finis F Conner [2] (pronounced Fy-niss) was born on July 28, 1943, in Gadsden, Alabama. He was the last of five children born to a carpenter and his wife. Conner grew up poor in Alabama, Texas, and Florida. At the age of 19, with $100 in his pocket, he boarded a train for San Jose, California, where a brother lived. Conner found a job as a clerk-typist at IBM and put himself through college, earning a degree in industrial management from San Jose State College in 1969. [3]

Shugart Associates

Conner met Alan Shugart at Memorex in the early 1970s. In 1973, Shugart, Conner, and seven others founded Shugart Associates, a company that pioneered the development of floppy disks. [4] At Shugart Associates, Conner was initially responsible for OEM Marketing [4] ultimately becoming its Western Region Sales Manager. [5] Shugart Associates was acquired in 1977 by Xerox.

Seagate Technology

In 1979, Conner, Shugart, and two others founded the hard drive manufacturer Seagate Technology. Seagate pioneered the 5.25-inch hard disk drive (HDD) form factor. The first 5.25-inch HDD was the ST506 . Its capacity was 5 MB. By 1984, there were differences with Seagate management, with Conner arguing that there was not enough emphasis on customer requests. [3]

Conner left Seagate, with $12 million in Seagate stock, to enjoy a semi-retirement.

Conner Peripherals

In 1985, John Squires left MiniScribe and with financing from Terry Johnson (MiniScribe founder) founded CoData to work on a new 3.5-inch disk drive. With a prototype of their product completed, Squires and Johnson approached Conner about joining Codata in late 1985. In 1986, [6] Conner merged his then defunct company, Conner Peripherals, with Squires and Johnson's CoData, adopting the name Conner Peripherals for the merged entity. Conner had trouble finding financing from venture capitalists, so he approached Compaq, which was in the market for an improved HDD for a portable computer it had under development. Compaq provided $12 million of capital and by 1987 (the first year of mass production), Conner had sold $113 million worth of 3.5" HDDs - with 90% going to Compaq. The first 3.5-inch product was the CP340 HDD with a capacity of 20 MB. The subsequent HDD, CP341, established the popularity of the ATA interface originally proposed by Western Digital. [7] By 1990, Conner Peripherals was the fastest growing start-up company in the history of US commerce, [8] beating the competition with HDDs that were lighter, more compact, and consumed less power. According to Finis Conner, one key aspect of success was to buy all the components (heads, disks, motors, chips) from other manufacturers but to excel in high-volume assembly and manufacturing. Conner peripherals was merged into Seagate in February 1996 [9] , at which point he left the company. For its fiscal year ending December 31, 1995, Conner reported about $2.4 billion in revenue compared to Seagate's fiscal year revenue of $4.5 billion. [10]

Post Conner Peripherals

Since the merger with Seagate, Conner has pursued a number of activities:

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Parallel ATA</span> Computer storage interface standard

Parallel ATA (PATA), originally AT Attachment, also known as Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE), is a standard interface designed for IBM PC-compatible computers. It was first developed by Western Digital and Compaq in 1986 for compatible hard drives and CD or DVD drives. The connection is used for storage devices such as hard disk drives, floppy disk drives, optical disc drives, and tape drives in computers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hard disk drive</span> Electro-mechanical data storage device

A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnetic material. The platters are paired with magnetic heads, usually arranged on a moving actuator arm, which read and write data to the platter surfaces. Data is accessed in a random-access manner, meaning that individual blocks of data can be stored and retrieved in any order. HDDs are a type of non-volatile storage, retaining stored data when powered off. Modern HDDs are typically in the form of a small rectangular box.

Maxtor Corporation was an American computer hard disk drive manufacturer. Founded in 1982, it was the third largest hard disk drive manufacturer in the world before being purchased by Seagate in 2006.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ST506/ST412</span>

The ST-506 and ST-412 were early hard disk drive products introduced by Seagate in 1980 and 1981 respectively, that later became construed as hard disk drive interfaces: the ST-506 disk interface and the ST-412 disk interface. Compared to the ST-506 precursor, the ST-412 implemented a refinement to the seek speed, and increased the drive capacity from 5 MB to 10 MB, but was otherwise highly similar.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">JT Storage</span> Hard drive manufacturer

JT Storage, Inc. was a maker of inexpensive IDE hard drives for personal computers based in San Jose, California. It was founded in 1994 by "Jugi" Tandon—the inventor of the double-sided floppy disk drive and founder of Tandon Corporation—and Tom Mitchell, a co-founder of Seagate and former president and Chief Operating Officer of both Seagate and Conner Peripherals.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shugart Associates</span> American computer peripheral manufacturer

Shugart Associates was a computer peripheral manufacturer that dominated the floppy disk drive market in the late 1970s and is famous for introducing the 5+1⁄4-inch "Minifloppy" floppy disk drive. In 1979 it was one of the first companies to introduce a hard disk drive form factor compatible with a floppy disk drive, the SA1000 form factor compatible with the 8-inch floppy drive form factor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Seagate Technology</span> American data storage company

Seagate Technology Holdings plc is an American data storage company. It was incorporated in 1978 as Shugart Technology and commenced business in 1979. Since 2010, the company has been incorporated in Dublin, Ireland, with operational headquarters in Fremont, California, United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology</span> Monitoring system in computer drives

Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology is a monitoring system included in computer hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs). Its primary function is to detect and report various indicators of drive reliability with the intent of anticipating imminent hardware failures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microdrive</span> One-inch hard disk format by IBM and Hitachi

The Microdrive is a type of miniature, 1-inch hard disk produced by IBM and Hitachi. These rotational media storage devices were designed to fit in CompactFlash (CF) Type II slots.

Micropolis Corporation was a disk drive company located in Chatsworth, California and founded in 1976. Micropolis initially manufactured high capacity hard-sectored 5.25-inch floppy drives and controllers, later manufacturing hard drives using SCSI and ESDI interfaces.

Conner Peripherals, Inc., was a company that manufactured hard drives for personal computers. Conner Peripherals was founded in 1985 by Seagate Technology co-founder and San Jose State University alumnus Finis Conner. In 1986, they merged with CoData, a Colorado start-up founded by MiniScribe founders Terry Johnson and John Squires. CoData was developing a new type of small hard disk that put the capacity of a 5.25-inch drive into the smaller 3.5-inch format. The CoData drive was the first Conner Peripherals product. The company was partially financed by Compaq, who was also a major customer for many years.

A hybrid drive is a logical or physical computer storage device that combines a faster storage medium such as solid-state drive (SSD) with a higher-capacity hard disk drive (HDD). The intent is adding some of the speed of SSDs to the cost-effective storage capacity of traditional HDDs. The purpose of the SSD in a hybrid drive is to act as a cache for the data stored on the HDD, improving the overall performance by keeping copies of the most frequently used data on the faster SSD drive.

Alan Field Shugart was an American engineer, entrepreneur and business executive whose career defined the modern computer disk drive industry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of hard disk drives</span> Development of computer data storage

In 1953, IBM recognized the immediate application for what it termed a "Random Access File" having high capacity and rapid random access at a relatively low cost. After considering technologies such as wire matrices, rod arrays, drums, drum arrays, etc., the engineers at IBM's San Jose California laboratory invented the hard disk drive. The disk drive created a new level in the computer data hierarchy, then termed Random Access Storage but today known as secondary storage, less expensive and slower than main memory but faster and more expensive than tape drives.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Priam Corporation</span> Manufacturer of hard disk drives

Priam Corporation was a company located in San Jose, California, founded in 1978 by William Schroeder and Al Wilson, two former Memorex executives, as a manufacturer of hard disk drives. Originally, they made high-capacity 14-inch drives, developed for mainframe computers, available for minicomputers and high-end workstations, but switched to 8-inch disk drives in 1980.

William D. Watkins is the former CEO of Seagate Technology, the world's largest manufacturer of hard drives. Watkins was appointed as the company's CEO in 2004 and served in this position until January 2009. He was appointed as CEO of BridgeLux, an emerging solid state lighting company in Silicon Valley, in January 2010.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of laptops</span>

The history of laptops describes the efforts, begun in the 1970s, to build small, portable personal computers that combine the components, inputs, outputs and capabilities of a desktop computer in a small chassis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Terry Johnson (entrepreneur)</span> Data storage engineer and entrepreneur (b. 1935, d. 2010)

Terry Johnson was an engineer and entrepreneur notable for his work on hard disk drives (HDD). Johnson's early career included engineering and management roles in magnetic recording at IBM (1964–70) and Memorex (1971–73). He then joined in the development of STC 8000 Super Disk, a high-end rotary actuator HDD funded by StorageTek.

MiniStor Peripherals, Inc., was a public American computer hardware company based in San Jose, California, and active from 1991 to 1995. The company was the first to manufacture and market PC Card spinning hard drives, based on the 1.8-inch hard drive specification invented earlier by Intégral. The company briefly rode a wave of success in this market before dissolving amid bankruptcy proceedings in April 1995.

References

  1. ↑ Flynn, Laurie J. (1999-02-01). "Compressed Data; Return of a Disk-Drive Jockey". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2020-01-10.
  2. ↑ Photo of Finis Conner at Seagate's 40th Anniversary in 2019
  3. 1 2 "A Novel Idea: Customer Satisfaction". The New York Times. Retrieved 2020-01-08.
  4. 1 2 Shugart Associates original business plan, 1973 ca., pp. 312-4
  5. ↑ Seagate Technology Prospectus, September 30, 1981, p. 16
  6. ↑ "The New Buzzword in Disk Drives: Cheap - May 10, 1999". archive.fortune.com. Retrieved 2020-01-10.
  7. ↑ Burniece, Tom (July 21, 2011). "Conner CP341 Drive (ATA/IDE)". Wikifoundry. Computer History Museum Storage Special Interest Group. Archived from the original on February 24, 2021. Retrieved January 8, 2020.
  8. ↑ Kupfer, Andrew (August 13, 1990). "AMERICA'S FASTEST GROWING COMPANY". Fortune Magazine. Fortune Media Group Holdings. pp. 48–53.
  9. ↑ "Seagate Technology Completes Merger with Conner Peripherals". Seagate Technology. February 5, 1996. Retrieved December 3, 2019.
  10. ↑ Brooks, Nancy (September 21, 1995). "Rival Disk Drive Makers Seagate, Conner Agree to $1-Billion Merger". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved December 3, 2019.
  11. ↑ Website: Conner Group History
  12. ↑ "The Disk Drive Baron Goes For Another Spin". Bloomberg. 28 December 1998. Retrieved January 9, 2020.
  13. ↑ "New Disk Drive Co. To Take On Seagate, Quantum". Archived from the original on 2017-04-03. Retrieved 2017-04-02.
  14. ↑ Business Wire, "Finis Conner, storage industry leader and visionary, has been appointed CEO of Millenniata", March 25th, 2010
  15. ↑ "Disk-drive pioneer tackling identity theft". Crain's Chicago Business. 2015-11-03. Retrieved 2020-01-10.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.