Al Shugart, disk-drive pioneer

The sizes and capacities of rotating magnetic media continues to boggle the imagination. I thought that the 60GB hard drive in my old Powerbook was impressive, but this week Fujitsu announced a 300GB 2.5-inch drive. Wow.

Meanwhile, you can pick up 750GB 3.5-inch SATA drives for desktops and servers – but it looks like Andrew Binstock is going to lose our bet that there will be single-spindle 1TB drives available this year.

What about pocket-sized devices? My iPod has an 80GB 1.8-inch drive, but Toshiba just introduced a 100GB drive, and Seagate is talking about a 120GB unit.

Astounding.

Let us pause and remember Al Shugart, the disk-drive pioneer and big thinker (pictured), who died Tuesday at age 76.