Alan Shugart passed away back on December 12th

Not really a newsworthy item unless you use a computer. He was a pioneer in the early days of hard drives, one of his teams when he was in charge of IBM's Direct Access Storage Devices (the earlier, formal name of hard drives were direct access storage devices: this was when tape and cards was king) created the floppy drive. He later formed his own drive company named after himself (I used to have Alan drives in my early PCs) which later became Seagate.

He did a lot of good in his 76 years on this earth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Shugart