History (1992): After Peter Bonyhard, Brendan Hegarty Accused by IBM

The ≠1 computer manufacturer is continuing to harass the ≠1 disk drive manufacturer.

After dragging Peter Bonyhard to court, IBM is now accusing another person from Seagate Technology, also a former IBM employee, and not one of the smallest ones: Doctor Brendan Hegarty who is VP and CTO therefore ahead of all of the company’s technology development.

Doctor Brendan Hegarty

The main complaint is that these 2 persons wouldd have given Seagate IBM’s trade secrets on MR heads, a new technology used to improve density of HDDs.

IBM has asked a federal judge in Minneapolis, MN to add Hegarty to the suit pending vs. Seagate after that documents provided by Seagate in response to allegations vs. Bonyhard.

Here is Seagate’s official answer: “Seagate will vigorously oppose any attempt by the IBM company to amend its complaint vs. Seagate and Dr. Peter Bonyhard to add Dr. Brendan Hegarty as a defendant. Seagate believes that IBM’s latest move is simply an attempt to avoid the effect of the District Court’s recent denial of IBM’s request for an injunction prohibiting Dr. Bonyhard from working on MR heads at Seagate and finding that IBM had not sufficiently identified any alleged trade secrets to warrant injunctive relief. The proposed IBM second amended complaint fails to even get the facts right. Rather than Seagate hiring Dr. Hegarty, Dr. Hegarty left IBM in 1987 to join Control Data Corp. and then joined Seagate in late 1989 when Seagate acquired Imprimis, a Control Data subsidiary. Both Seagate and Dr. Hegarty categorically deny the allegation made in the proposed amended complaint.”

On December 20, 1991, IBM won an injunction in US District Court in Minneapolis which prevented Bonyhard from working on Seagate’s MR team. Shortly after, Seagate filed a counterclaim vs. Big Blue charging it with intimidating IBM employees who would like to work for competing companies.

In April, the 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals lifted the injunction that barred Bonyhard from working on Seagate’s MR technology. But IBM has sent its motion back to US District Court for further review.

If Big Blue keeps on proceeding vs. all its former employees, US judges are going to have a lot of work and could even some day have to face Seagate’s chairman himself, Alan Shugart, who worked 18 years for IBM. For the time being, Seagate has not unveiled disk drives using MR heads. The only announcement concerns future shipments of heads, based on this technology, to Philips Electronics to include these heads in DCC cartridge drives for audio digital recording for the consumer market.

Matsushita’s first gen DCC decks will incorporate heads manufactured by Seagate and OEMed to Matsushita from Philips in Holland.

But, next year, second sourcing of DCC heads could be available from TDK and Sharp, along with Matsushita’s own heads.

MR heads for DCCs allow a 50Kbpi recording density. Each head, shaped as a chip, includes 9 inductive elements for digital recording, 9 MR elements for digital reading and 2 MR elements for analog playback of actual standard audio tapes.

Globally, we’re still amazed by the large number of suits filed in this worldwide storage industry. The last ones concern disk drive form factors since US patent organizations allow that a patent can simply be filed on the dimensions of a drive. This is how firms like Rodime, PrairieTek or Conner patented form factors.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠53, published on June 1992.

Note: Hegarty, 71, of Eden Prairie, MN, passed away on June 5, 2014 from brain cancer. Survived by his wife of 20 years, Carla; children, Stephen (Jennifer Robey) Hegarty, Antony Hegarty, Sara Hegarty, Nick (Ella) Hegarty.