[The following was originally contributed by Bill Carlson to the Event description and then moved to a comment]
Finis Conner and Al Shugart were friends and co-founders of Seagate. Finis, in charge of marketing, eventually saw the need for a smaller form factor and proposed that within Seagate. The Engineering team, led by Doug Mann responded that "anything 3.5" can do, 5" can do better", based on the notion that more surface area of the larger media would always be advantageous for capacity and cost per megabyte. Frustrated, Finis left Seagate, made arrangements with a drive development team in Colorado, and sold the idea of a smaller, cheaper, and faster drive to Compaq. Compaq invested in the new company "Conner Peripherals" and gave it a large initial contract which bootstrapped the operation into the fastest growing company in disk drive history. Finis then hired ex-IBM drive designers led by V.P. Mike ____ to penetrate the more profitable enterprise market, in a new San Jose operation on Zanker Road (now the headquarters of SEMI). Finis also made some tactical errors, one of which was hiring a respected but generally disliked ex-Seagate operations manager Tom Mitchell (fired by Seagate for trying to take over the company from Al Shugart) who ran roughshod over the entire organization, resulting in firings and departures of key personnel. Eventually Finis struck a deal with his ex-partner Al Shugart, and Conner Peripherass was merged into Seagate, with the Scotts Valley design team put in charge of the Conner operation in San Jose. The merger provided Seagate with a 3.5 inch product line, a desktop design team in Colorado, and asian manufacturing facilities. Subsequent commercial failure of the initial Seagate 2.5 inch mobile products from the San Jose design center resulted in closure of that facility, which were later reintroduced with improved designs from the Longmont Colorado operation.

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