where would we be without digital storage we'd be stuck in traffic trying
to take our film to get developed at the drugstore and might even still be using
Scrolls or something but believe it or not the long Odyssey from the era before
electricity to storing terabytes of information on pint size ssds actually
begins with paper specifically it began with Punch Cards which were quite
important way before the year 2000 when the State of Florida suddenly decided
that poking holes in a piece of paper was too difficult for whatever reason in
fact Punch Cards and punch tape go all the way back to the early 1700s when
they were used in looms to weave textile
patterns patterns on tape could correspond to machine instructions as
they did in things like player pios or to numbers and characters as they did in
things like early computers tabulation machines from the late 1800s use punch
tape to help count large data sets including helping to finish the US
Census way ahead of schedule in 1890 of
course Punch Cards don't exactly hold a lot of data with the typical punch card
holding less than a tenth of a kilobyte so you'd need about 28 billion of them
to match the capacity of a typical 2 tbte modern hard drive as digital
Computing started becoming more popular magnetic storage came to dominate but
this doesn't mean that the hard drive was the direct successor to the punch
card an early form of magnetic storage was drum memory large cylinders with the
data written on the outside like modern hard drives drum memory had read right
heads but these were stationary instead
the drum spun around at high speeds while the head waited for the relevant
piece of data to come around although they could store a lot more data than
old Punch Cards their capacity was still pretty tiny by modern standards only a
few kilobytes each drum memory was actually quite popular until the 1950s
but Magnetic Tape which was actually patented a few years prior to drum
memory was far more enduring as tape drives are still widespread today for
archival storage you can learn more about that here Magnetic Tape was and
still is great for cheap data storage in
bulk but with slow access times resulting from having to constantly wind
the tape back and forth a quicker solution was needed as computers became
more powerful work was done in the 1940
on using cathode ray tubes to store data the same type of tube you can find in
Old School TVs by firing electrons to
create patterns representing ones and zeros that would stick to the tube
however core memory quickly became much more popular especially due to its lower
cost for working memory which we today
refer to as RAM unlike earlier forms of
magnetic storage core memory didn't have any moving Parts making it much quicker
core memory worked by by changing the magnetic polarity of small iron oxide
Loops which were woven together in fact
core memory was often made by hand by garment workers but the small capacities
of core memory led to a development of a compromise between access speeds and
size The Familiar hard drive was introduced in 1956 on one of those
massive old school IBM machines although it was 50 ft tall and contained 50
platters this early drive only held 5
megabytes but after IBM introduced a model with one head per platter to speed
up access times the foundation was laid for the modern hard drive design and
speaking of getting smaller there was still no solution for portable data
until the venerable floppy disc appeared on the scene in
1971 although it did use magnetic storage technology like hard drives
their small size and lightweight made them very useful for relatively small
programs and files that were common in that day the first discs were those
giant 8 in ones that only held 80 kiloby
but gradually floppy capacity grew and we got the ubiquitous 1.44 megabyte 3.5
in discs that aren't really useful anymore for anything other than making
pen holders and cool artsy crafts things or throwing them at your friends once
you get tired of playing Oregon Trail although floppy drives tried to Stave
off their demise with release of super floppy products such as the Almost
Famous Zip drive of the mid 1990s the writable CD and later flash memory
nailed the floppy's coffin shut with much higher capacities at lower prices
although flash memory was first developed in 1980 and took a while to be
widely used for long-term storage It ultimately pushed Optical media into
increasing irrelevance as well as the ever popular USB thumb drives and SD
cards came to dominate the market because flashtech doesn't rely on moving
parts like Optical drives access times are much shorter and as Tiny transistors
that store data on flash drives keep getting smaller and smaller we now have
multiple terabyte ssds and SD cards that can store 512 GB you'd need over 7
billion of those standard Punch Cards we talked about in the beginning of this
episode to match just that SD card which
would stack 800 M high no word yet
though on when we're going to build a real life holocron Vault so I'll get
back to you on that brain tree allows you to code for easy online payments if
you're building a mobile app and searching for a simple payment solution
check them out the brain tree v.0 SDK is one amazingly simple integration away
from giving you an easy payment solution it allows you to accept Apple pay
Android pay PayPal venmo credit cards even Bitcoin and if something new pops
up brain tree will support that too they're used by Uber Airbnb and and even
GitHub and their scalable integration will allow it to fit into your app with
even just a few lines of code try out the sandbox and learn more about brain
tree and get your first $50,000 in transactions fee free at Braintree
payments.com tequi thanks for watching like it if you liked it dislike if you
disliked it let us know if you have comments on some other history of
something subject that you'd like us to check out don't forget to go to lonus
Tech tips and watch our ridiculous videos over there or to channel super
fun which has arguably more or less ridiculous videos I'm really not even
sure these days