IBM and Fuji Announce Tape Storage Breakthrough

robkill writes "IBM and Fuji have announced a breakthrough in the amount of data that can be stored on magnetic tape, a 15X improvement to 6.67 billion bits of data per square inch. IBM estimates that it will be 5 years before this hits the mass market"

Comments

Remember Write Rings? 1600 bpi? 800 bpi? 556bpi?

[Cliff Stoll]

In the 1950's, data was recorded on 7-track tapes at 200 bits per inch. Those 7 tracks recorded 6-bit characters (EBCDIC?) with one bit of parity. A 2400 foot tape might hold some 5 million characters (upper case only, please). By the mid 1960's tape densities more than doubled to 556 bpi.

Sorting algorithms were written to sort information using mag tapes; the speediest would make the tape vibrate in the vacuum columns with a minimum of reel-to-reel motion.

By the 1970's, most shops changed to 800bpi, 9-track tapes, which would happily handle 8-track encoding. Then came 1600 bits per inch -- you could store an amazing 50 megabytes onto a single tape.

There was a constant temptation to compress data so as to stuff as much onto the tape as possible. As a result, many graduate students earned their assistantships by decoding tapes written with oddball parity, density, and encoding combinations.

The scattering matrices from my dissertation are encoded onto 9-track 1600 bpi tapes, carefully stored in my climate uncontrolled attic.