The History of Computer Storage
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2017-05-06
·
1,120 words · ~5 min read
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where would we be without digital storage we'd be stuck in traffic trying
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to take our film to get developed at the drugstore and might even still be using
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Scrolls or something but believe it or not the long Odyssey from the era before
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electricity to storing terabytes of information on pint size ssds actually
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begins with paper specifically it began with Punch Cards which were quite
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important way before the year 2000 when the State of Florida suddenly decided
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that poking holes in a piece of paper was too difficult for whatever reason in
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fact Punch Cards and punch tape go all the way back to the early 1700s when
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they were used in looms to weave textile
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patterns patterns on tape could correspond to machine instructions as
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they did in things like player pios or to numbers and characters as they did in
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things like early computers tabulation machines from the late 1800s use punch
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tape to help count large data sets including helping to finish the US
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Census way ahead of schedule in 1890 of
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course Punch Cards don't exactly hold a lot of data with the typical punch card
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holding less than a tenth of a kilobyte so you'd need about 28 billion of them
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to match the capacity of a typical 2 tbte modern hard drive as digital
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Computing started becoming more popular magnetic storage came to dominate but
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this doesn't mean that the hard drive was the direct successor to the punch
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card an early form of magnetic storage was drum memory large cylinders with the
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data written on the outside like modern hard drives drum memory had read right
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heads but these were stationary instead
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the drum spun around at high speeds while the head waited for the relevant
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piece of data to come around although they could store a lot more data than
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old Punch Cards their capacity was still pretty tiny by modern standards only a
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few kilobytes each drum memory was actually quite popular until the 1950s
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but Magnetic Tape which was actually patented a few years prior to drum
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memory was far more enduring as tape drives are still widespread today for
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archival storage you can learn more about that here Magnetic Tape was and
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still is great for cheap data storage in
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bulk but with slow access times resulting from having to constantly wind
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the tape back and forth a quicker solution was needed as computers became
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more powerful work was done in the 1940
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on using cathode ray tubes to store data the same type of tube you can find in
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Old School TVs by firing electrons to
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create patterns representing ones and zeros that would stick to the tube
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however core memory quickly became much more popular especially due to its lower
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cost for working memory which we today
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refer to as RAM unlike earlier forms of
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magnetic storage core memory didn't have any moving Parts making it much quicker
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core memory worked by by changing the magnetic polarity of small iron oxide
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Loops which were woven together in fact
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core memory was often made by hand by garment workers but the small capacities
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of core memory led to a development of a compromise between access speeds and
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size The Familiar hard drive was introduced in 1956 on one of those
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massive old school IBM machines although it was 50 ft tall and contained 50
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platters this early drive only held 5
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megabytes but after IBM introduced a model with one head per platter to speed
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up access times the foundation was laid for the modern hard drive design and
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speaking of getting smaller there was still no solution for portable data
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until the venerable floppy disc appeared on the scene in
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1971 although it did use magnetic storage technology like hard drives
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their small size and lightweight made them very useful for relatively small
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programs and files that were common in that day the first discs were those
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giant 8 in ones that only held 80 kiloby
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but gradually floppy capacity grew and we got the ubiquitous 1.44 megabyte 3.5
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in discs that aren't really useful anymore for anything other than making
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pen holders and cool artsy crafts things or throwing them at your friends once
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you get tired of playing Oregon Trail although floppy drives tried to Stave
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off their demise with release of super floppy products such as the Almost
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Famous Zip drive of the mid 1990s the writable CD and later flash memory
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nailed the floppy's coffin shut with much higher capacities at lower prices
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although flash memory was first developed in 1980 and took a while to be
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widely used for long-term storage It ultimately pushed Optical media into
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increasing irrelevance as well as the ever popular USB thumb drives and SD
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cards came to dominate the market because flashtech doesn't rely on moving
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parts like Optical drives access times are much shorter and as Tiny transistors
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that store data on flash drives keep getting smaller and smaller we now have
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multiple terabyte ssds and SD cards that can store 512 GB you'd need over 7
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billion of those standard Punch Cards we talked about in the beginning of this
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episode to match just that SD card which
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would stack 800 M high no word yet
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though on when we're going to build a real life holocron Vault so I'll get
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payments.com tequi thanks for watching like it if you liked it dislike if you
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