Shugart is talking about dog years, of course. Or it could be computer industry years. His deadpan humor and penchant for making outlandish statements often earn him the description "colorful." But really, the old man of the disk-drive industry, at age 67, just likes to tell it like it is.

In Shugart's lexicon, fancy theories and $10 words are boiled down to their essence. His mantra for success in the disk-drive industry: "Make it bigger, faster, cheaper."

Shugart has held steadfast to other maxims. His dictum to never sell drives below cost "was a revolutionary idea," says James Porter, a veteran industry observer with Disk/Trend Inc., Mountain View, Calif.

That was one reason Shugart was able to keep Seagate profitable during the dark days of 1993, when every other drive marker was bleeding red ink, Porter says. Another was Shugart's belief in making all the stuff that goes into disk drives, including heads, media and motors.

Life has been good to Shugart. From his panoramic office windows at Seagate's worldwide headquarters in Scotts Valley, Calif., he looks upon a grove of redwoods in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Shugart arrives early, usually by 6:30 a.m., makes the first pot of coffee and dresses casually in short sleeves and slacks.

Does he have thoughts of retiring? "What would I do if I retired? Travel?" he asks brusquely. "I do whatever I want to do now." He already travels around the world on his quarterly visits to Seagate's far-flung manufacturing facilities.

Shugart's first rule of life is to enjoy it. It's a simple sentiment, but one that may best sum up Shugart's unorthodox career, which includes a hiatus as a bar owner and fishing boat operator.

As he tells it, it is not a story of driving ambition from childhood. He was raised by a single mother, a schoolteacher in the farming town of Chino, Calif., east of Los Angeles. It was the midst of the Great Depression and he began working at age 10, delivering magazines and working in stores to buy school clothes. Always a good student, he went to college at the University of Redlands, not far from home, where he earned a degree in engineering physics.

Shugart had no grand plan to get into the still-neophyte computer industry. He was married and broke and took the first opportunity that came along--fixing punch-card tabulators for IBM Corp. He made $275 a month and was proud of it.

When he decided to quit, IBM offered him a job at its new research facility in San Jose, Calif., where, in 1955, the company still was trying to figure out what to make of the computer age. One of his first projects was RAMAC, which stood for Random Access Method of Accounting. It was the first machine of any kind to use a disk drive instead of punch cards.

While Shugart is sometimes credited with helping develop the first disk drive, that's not true. He designed the production model of the computer that used the drive.

"It was really easy for me to picture the entire computer's logic in my head and put it on paper," he says. "I think that's something you're born with. It just turned out I happened to be good at logic."

Shugart's real knack may be for managing engineers. He rose through the ranks at IBM, and in 1969 was transferred to Harrison, N.Y., with the title of director of engineering. Being transferred to the center of power at IBM would seem like a career maker. But Shugart quit after two weeks.

Within days, he was recruited by Memorex Corp. back in California to start an engineering division to make peripherals. As many as 200 IBMers followed. Porter, who was with Memorex at the time, says engineers respect Shugart.

Finis Conner, one of those who followed Shugart from IBM, agrees: "His management style is the style technical people like, and that is basically hands-off. He's not combative or confrontational."

Conner was among the handful of employees who left Memorex in 1972 with Shugart to found Shugart Associates Inc., a start-up venture that would pioneer the use of floppy disks for computer storage.

By 1974, Shugart had burned through his start-up venture capital and had no product to show for it. The economy was in a recession, and the venture capitalists decided to make a change. "There's an argument about that," Shugart says. "I say I got fired, and they say I quit."

It was Conner who showed up in 1979 with an idea of developing a small disk drive for personal computers. PC customers were adding multiple floppy drives to their machines. "Finis observed we could sell them a drive with three times the capacity at the same price," Shugart says.

Seagate Technology Inc.--originally Shugart Technology Inc.--made a 5.25-inch, 5-Mbyte drive that sold for $1,500. That set the stage for an explosion in the PC market now that vast new sums of online storage were available.

Shugart's legacy may be that he helped push the PC market ahead by at least a couple of years. He also was the first independent drive maker, an important development for the PC market. Shugart's other claim to fame: He survived.

The industry he spawned created as many as 70 competitors over the years but has undergone rapid consolidation. There may be only 20 suppliers left, four of which control 80 percent of the market, including Seagate, Western Digital Corp., Quantum Corp. and IBM's Storage Systems Division.

"He's survived numerous wars. He's seen all the ups and downs," says Charles Haggerty, chief executive of Western Digital, Irvine, Calif. "He can clearly be classified as one of the real pioneers."

"They've made some mistakes and had their ups and downs, but you have to give Al credit for being remarkably good at getting the big stuff right," says Bill Miller, a former Quantum president who now runs Avid Technologies Inc., Tewksbury, Mass.

Of Seagate's five founders only Shugart remains. Conner left in 1984 for reasons that remain unclear. It is safe to say Conner was pushing to develop new products. A little more than a year later, Conner launched his own company, Conner Peripherals Inc., to make the first 3.25-inch drives. Conner's company soared; Seagate languished.

Analysts say Seagate, under the presidency of Tom Mitchell, another founder, was too focused on cutting costs and too slow to develop new products. Shugart made a gutsy move: Despite a lack of capital, he engineered Seagate's acquisition of Control Data Corp.'s profitable Imprimis Technology Inc., which made drives for mainframes.

Seagate was catapulted into the high-performance, high-capacity marketplace. It also picked up the capacity to make its own heads, a key component of the company's vertical integration strategy today.

Shugart also took direct control of Seagate's operations when the board ousted Mitchell in 1991. Shugart became president, as well as chairman and chief executive, and began shaking things up. He also pushed vertical integration.

Seagate's vertical integration, allowing it to capture more margin, and its stronghold in the higher end of the market, enabled the company to weather the industry's bloody market-share battles over the next three years.

Shugart then acquired Conner's ailing company in 1996, cementing his leadership. The Conner acquisition gave Seagate a strong position in high-volume desktop drives and moved it into tape drives. For its fiscal year ended in June, Seagate reported $8.9 billion in revenue.

Shugart also started diversifying into software through a string of acquisitions. Seagate Software hit $1 billion in sales last year. While Shugart has been hard-pressed to find hoped-for synergies between his mass-storage business and his software operations, that may not matter so long as software contributes to the bottom line.

Now the world is changing again, and Shugart has his work cut out for him. Quantum and Western Digital are moving into high-performance drives, hoping to dislodge Seagate's grip on that market, and margins are likely to decline. Vertical integration also can be a double-edged sword. In a downturn, companies have to wrestle with excess capacity. And they need to be best-of-class in every area.

Shugart will have to keep Seagate nimble and focused while managing its increasingly diversified interests and sprawling manufacturing empire, which employs more than 100,000 people.

He has survived 469 years, however, and isn't showing any signs of slowing down.