Slashdot Mirror
A History of Storage, From Punch Cards To Blu-ray
notthatwillsmith writes "Maximum PC just posted a comprehensive visual retrospective about data storage, starting with the once state of the art punch card and moving through the popular formats of yesteryear, including everything from magtape to Blu-ray discs. It's amazing how much data you could pack on a few hundred feet of half-inch magnetic tape!"
The article fails to include the Library of Congress, to which all other storage mediums should be compared...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
For those who don't want to go through several pages of ads, is here.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Personally, I don't see Blu-Ray working like DVD and CD did. When the CD was released it was huge compared to HDDs. I remember possessing a 4GB drive, 7 CDs would match that. And CDs were pretty cheap by that time. Then came the DVD which was 100 times better than old magnetic tapes(I still have some of those lying around, dumb spacefillers).
Now we have expensive Blu-ray which is 25GB per disc(50 for dl) and it's not at all impressive. It doesn't kick the ass of DVD. I can live with the quality DVD for a quite a while it's nothing compared to the ugly mess that we call VHS-tapes. They are not impressively big(with 1TB drives around for ca. eur. 100) and they cost a ton. Not only is the optical drive prohibitly expensive, the discs themselves do not come cheap). When the price of a Blu-Ray disc is 6x that of a DVD(they carry around 6 times the storage, sounds fair to me) call me again. Until that time, HDDs and DVDs will do just nicely.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Clay tablets. The oldest technology and most reliable to date.
It's not that comprehensive - there's no mention of drums or hard disk cartridges.
The first system i worked on as an assembler programmer at the start of the 80s was an old 60s machine based around a drum. We booted it with paper tape and punched cards. (Ultronics SGS)
...we notched lines on sticks. And we LIKED IT THAT WAY. We even developed a counting system out of it. See?
IIIVIIIX
That's 10. Ignore the previous notches. Some young whippersnappers thought it would be funny to do "subtractive" forms whereby IV would be "four". Oooo. I'm so impressed. Not. GET OFF MY LAWN.
Oh, and they forgot about magnetic drums. :-P
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I had an older friend who was a CS student in college during the late 70's. He had his final semester program on punch cards. Like a typical student he was rushing to class to turn in his project but tripped on the stairs thus sending the cards all over the place. You could hear his anguish miles away!
Bird : Bird : Giant Eye : Pyramid : Bird : Giant Eye : Dead Fish : Cat Head : Cat Head : Cat Head :
I have used every one of those.
I have even edited programs on paper tape with a pair of scissors and scotch tape.
Just call me Sid.
My first encounter with computer storage was utility bills. "Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate". Smart-ass that I am I always stapled the check to them.
Then I bought a Timex-Sinclair 1000, which used cassette as storage.
My mom brought her work portable home about the same time, and wanted me to help her get it working. It used five and a half inch floppies; I don't remember the capacity, but you had to have the OS floppy in one drive and the other drive was used for data.
I bought a used IBM XT with its ten meg hard drive, and WOW what an amazing amount of storage it was! Afterwards I installed bigger and bigger drives, among other components. At one time that XT was a 386, the only original parts were the case, power supply, and keyboard.
This of course was followed by less quaint forms of storage.
Ahh, the memories...
Free Martian Whores!
I worked with a bunch of Jaz Drives back in the day. One person dropped a disk, and it failed. The disk was inserted into a drive, and the drive failed. Another disk was inserted into that drive, and that disk failed. It spread like a plague through all of the machines.
All of the money and data lost due to those things still makes me cringe.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
It manages to list lots of faliures and successes, but still managed to miss HDD's and SSD, y'know, the sporta thing where people probably store most of their data
When I started college they still had their keypunch machine sitting in the computer room. Thank Dog we were already onto those keyboards with the lined paper feeding through the middle. People would fight to get one of the two available CRTs. When I started my first job our printer was booted/connected using punch cards. Suddenly... I... feel... old.
Now we see the violence inherent in the system.
Going forward, look for the eSATA interface to become more prominent.
While I would dearly love to see eSATA become more than at best a niche interface, its not going to happen. USB3 with backwards compatibility and Firewire poised to hit 3.2GB/s in it's next standard, I wouldn't bet the farm on eSATA becoming more popular than either standard.
On another note, they mention the MD card, but none of Sony's other forays into proprietary storage systems. One could probably devote a whole article in itself to Sony's endless attempts to release a storage system only compatible with Sony products and have it gain main stream acceptance.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
google Daimanta bluray
Poor little fanboy, the DVD->BluRay transition easily out pacing the VHS->DVD transition must be killing you.
Absolutely amazing job by Sony to have this massive success of BluRay during one of the worst economic climates in half a decade and requiring new TV hardware to fully support it.
This entire article seems a little anachronistic.
and only recently has it become common to find new PCs with a naked 3.5-inch drive bay.
What are they talking about? I haven't seen a new PC with a floppy drive in years.
Dislike the Electoral College? Lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
The article also forgot to mention that Jaquard (sp?) is the initial inventor of the punched card, since that's what controlled the looms.
And, of course, my favoritest kind of memory, the CRT. Yes, that was a very early memory device. And CORE. And the paper format that Byte (or Compute, I forget which) magazine tried to get adopted in the 80's, a form of which appears on shipping labels today.
5.25" floppies were only used until '82? I was using them well into 1992...
This article reminds me of my first MOS in the Marine Corps, I was supposedly a "Main Frame Operator", a fancy way of saying I was supposed to be a tape ape. This was in 1993. They've since changed that MOS to a generic Computer Operator. The good thing for me? I never touched a main frame the entire time I was in. (after I got out, that's a different story)
Hmm, it appears my "real" MOS 4066 has now been turned into a strictly programming MOS. Interesting. At the time they were a different MOS, 4067 I think. 4066 used to be small systems specialist or some such crap. I did networking, Banyan Vines and then later, NT 3.51 support. Banyan was such an underrated server OS. Loved it. Novell and Microsoft really ripped those guys off.
Sent from your iPad.
Not that they really missed much by doing so...
This was another of Sinclair's cheap and cheerful designs that never took off - it was used on the Sinclair MX and QL (remember that? - thought not!) computers. The stringy floppy was a small form factor hybrid between a floppy and tape drive. The tapes themself were about the size of a compact flash drive, although a bit fatter, and what they contained was a continuous loop of tape three-dimensionally arranged so that the bulk of it was looped around one spindle, and the other end was looped around another... I'm not sure what the point of it was really meant to be other than the physical small size.. I guess the endless tape loop was meant to give it some advantage.
I wasn't aware that punch cards were created in the 1700s
virtual storage will change the business model of hard drive manufacturing companies. keep an eye on EMC.
To get a better look at where storage came from, head on over to IBM's Archives: http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_intro.html Then check out the historical product profiles, documentation and videos: http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_reference.html
Back in my university days, we used these for offline archival.
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
I keep two old technologies around to show others how far we've come: punch cards and a thicknet vampire tap. Most at least know about punch cards, but not many have ever heard of a vampire tap. That usually generates a "you're sh*ting me" kind of response.
Back in my childhood, my dad took a couple thousands of those phased out punch cards... we used them to takes notes for YEARS, we just had a lot of them... at least all that paper was used for transferring information, even if not used for it's original purpose...
Quote: "The long length presented plenty of opportunities for tears and breaks, so in 1952, IBM devised bulky floor standing drives that made use of vacuum columns to buffer the nickel-plated bronze tape."
Wrongo, buddy. Stop cribbing from IBM's website. IBM is notorious for making themselves out as "pioneers" for every computing technology.
The first magnetic-tape drive for a computer to ACTUALLY BE SHIPPED was the Univac Uniservo drive. First system with drives went to the US Census Bureau in December 1951--more than a year before IBM shipped their first tape drive. (and yes, it used nickel-plated bronze tape.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_tape_data_storage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNISERVO
Why did they hit on Zip and Jaz, but leave off Rev drives?
Unpleasantries.
You're responding to the standard Xbox/HD-DVD sour grapes that gets posted in every Blu-Ray story.
Once Sony kicked the shit out of HD-DVD suddenly:
* Digital distribution is the answer
* 480p looks just as good as 1080p
* Anything bigger than a DVD is just being wasteful
* Even if you need more storage than a DVD you can just use 'really good compression' anyways
Back in the sad and pathetic Zonk days when every day was a constant FUD fest against Blu-Ray these guys were in bliss. Now they have turned into bitter trolls who jump into any thread with Blu-Ray in the title to spew their bitter resentment.
Youth of today, what do they know? I was the first person in the company to have a mag tape to mag tape assembler, but I had to write my own FP library because the supplier failed to deliver in time.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I was wondering where DLT went too, but then considered that it was never really a "consumer" storage solution. VERY popular in business though, with quite a history. 9Track also. Had to deal with both of those about 10 yrs ago.
What most amazed me is that the MAJORITY of our big customers provided their raw data, and required us to send back the processed goods, on 9Track. And these were big names like Phillip Morris.
But at that time there just wasn't a more economical way to ship large amounts of data.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
From TFA:
In 1966, HP introduced the 2753A Tape Punch, which boasted a blistering fast tape pinch speed of 120 characters per second and sold for $4,150.
The paper tape system developed for the Colossus project was a bit more impressive: they settled on 5000 char/s, but found they could crank up the speed to about 9000 char/s before the tape would disintegrate. The fastest commercial system I could find got 2000 char/s, with burst speeds up to 10x that.
In 1980 a Gigabyte of memory was a large room full of Winchester drives. If you did computing on IBMs back then, you used (although maybe never saw) Winchester drives.
I liked drum drives too - not much space, but they looked cool.
But, watch out for fan-folded punched paper tape. As the paper aged, it would crack on the folds.
and it was fun to make the operator have to deal with it... of course, nothing was better than shuffling your roommates program deck.
Seems to be focused on REMOVABLE media since they skipped most HD info entirely.
They still missed what i used for many years, the removable platter or disk pack. I fought with our Wang computer for over 10 years doing backup onto a 13MB removable HD platter. 80MB drive with multiple platters, the top one being a removable cartridge. Lugged one (well, two actually) of those suckers home each week for ages.
At least i won that fight...the Wang now sits vanquished in my dungeon...waiting until i get brave enough to turn off everything else in the house and see if it still fires up :) Everyone needs at least one Hard Drive that weighs more than they do!
I agree some of the dates were a little premature...common manufacture dates perhaps, not usage.
And then there is the not so common dates....we still use the T1000 Travan tape drive daily and the Jaz drive is still hooked up :)
Thats the main problem I see, these major storage mediums of today have no durability. A bit of dust wiped in and your 30$ blu ray gets stuck or skips. I have had some you cant even see the scratch and they no longer play. CDs still would pretty much play with some scratches, DVD a bit more picky and Blu Rays extremely poor at reading imperfect disks. The other major problem is their size, you cant stick a disk in your pocket, or not with out the case poking you. I am looking forward to everything being on solid state. Movies, music, games, all come on flash cards or drives. No moving parts to break on your player either.
are drums and, from a period in the '80s, using VCRs?
From the original article: "Magneto-Optical Drive . . . If you've ever owned one of these drives, award yourself 100 geek-cred points, and 1000 points if you still own one."
Gimme a couple o'thousand of them geek cred points!
I had three Fujitsu MO drives, on line from about 1997 to 2002. I used them for hard drive backup and off-line storage. The reason was simple - best cost-per-megabyte of all media during that period, plus luxurious high capacity by standards of that era.
The rules are simple: every advance in processor speed, memory, hard drive capacity, screen resolution, app complexity, file formats, I/O interfaces, and I/O devices results in users generating bigger and bigger files, more and more data. Hard drives are always at the head of the curve on sheer capacity, but until the past few years, hard drives were also expensive. How then do you find the best balance between economy of hardware costs, economy of media costs and storage space, and economy of time to write files and backup. In that era, late 90's, hard drives were roughly in the 500MB - 4GB range, and pricey. So how do you backup? I used CDs, DVDs, Colorado/QIC tapes, and then MO's.
CDs seemed great c1992-1994, but write speeds then were sloooow, their capacities quickly became inadequate, and they were pricey until DVDs came along.
DVDs were just like CDs, just a generation farther in terms of speed and capacity, but with the same caveats and shortcomings. Whether CD or DVD, these media were simply behind the curve compared to HD capacity and speed.
(Blu-ray simply extends these same issues to another generation. Optical is useful as a medium of large file exchange and distribution, but until someone comes up with a 500GB or 2TB 5.25 optical disk for $5 that can do a full write in 30 minutes, it is mainly useless for most backup tasks.)
QIC tapes were great for total system backup and restore, but only for relatively small HDs, and they were slow for random data access, the tapes were pricey, and the technology was being phased out by 2002.
MO fit the bill for robust high capacity affordable storage. It was the genuine diamond-in-the-rough. I could not find my little file of calculations from back then, but the drives were affordable (comparable to any CD recorder), the media were a fraction of the cost-per-megabyte of writable CDs (and then DVDs), read/write access times were way better than CD, the media were sturdy and well protected. Capacities were 640MB, like CDs. but reusable, faster, cheaper. It was all good things.
I never understood back then why it wasn't more popular, because it was superior in almost all respects of usability and expense. Technologically, I suppose there will be experts here who can comment on that, but it seemed like a fairly dependable technology, which lives on today as DVD-RAM (also dying). I suppose that the companies who made it just never organized the way that Blu-ray or HD-DVD consortia organized and pushed for their formats.
I have long since copied all of my MO disks to more contemporary storage, but my Fujitsu SCSI-interfaced DynaMO drives are still here on my shelf, ready to power up anytime I want to plug in - and yes, they work just great.
All of these discussions become moot when GMR was discovered (giant magneto-resistance), suddenly pushing HD capacities from 4GB to 18GB, and then onto today's TB capacities. Today, there is no pragmatic way, for the home / office / small business user to backup PCs with a few TBs of data except by using other HDs. And since HD prices have had a steep decline, the cost-per-GB is dirt cheap these days. My own backup strategies for the past few years have been exclusively HD-to-HD, having MULTIPLE backup sets at all times that are cheap, fast, and run-in-the background. HD-to-HD backup far superior to any CD-DVD-QIC-MO-BluRay solution - heartily recommended to all users - and that advice earns me a another couple o'thousand of them geek cred points!
I'm still a padawan in the IT world, but I seem to remember seeing pictures of big pizza-box looking drives that I thought were the precursor to floppies. I don't know what they are called, so I can't find a link to reference to. OH well, I'm sure someone on here knows, and knows they should have been included
Back in high school c1970, we got the coolest toy - a rack mount high speed paper tape reader to feed our PDP-8S. We could load our 4K Fortran, and still have half the memory leftover for programming. Evidently our school had a bigger budget than where you were, because we also got the fanfold tape splice & repair gizmo.
the article completely ignores the syquest drives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SyQuest_Technology
before e-mail and cd-r rendered them obsolete, syqyest's removable hard drives were the standard in the prepress and publishing industry. syquest 44 and 88 megabyte drives were traded around like floppies. especially since floppies couldn't hold a multi-megabyte digital image.
back in the '90s you could hardly find a graphic designer who didn't have a 5.25" syquest drive (attached to their mac) and at least a handful of discs in a drawer. the discs were expensive (about a hundred bucks, i think) and people got annoyed when one wasn't returned by the prepress or print shop. on the other hand, they were so ubiquitous that sending one out with picture files almost always prompted the return of another with a different set of files. with luck, you could always maintain an inventory of a handful of discs.
when religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, governments will resort to real opiates.
We had an assignment to write a program which checked 4 conditions and acted accordingly, something that should take about 20 cards. One smart-ass punched up an 800 card program (many cards exact duplicates), then discovered they wouldn't all fit in the card hopper at once! Program probably wouldn't have all fit in the 4K of magnetic core on the GA-1830 anyway. I wonder what that guy is doing now...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Anyhow, he showed us a picture of himself standing next to The First Hard Drive (cue angelic chorus) as demonstrated by IBM. It was about as tall as a man, the platters were exposed to view and there was (IIRC) only one head, which looked like a big robot arm. To read from different platters it pulled out of the assembly, moved up and down, then moved into the drive again. Unbelievable that they've become so tiny and intricate. IIRC (I'm probably a bit off!) that first drive had a capacity of about a megabyte or so.
Maurice Wilkes is also credited as the first person recorded as suggesting the idea of the "subroutine". According to Wikipedia, he also came up with the ideas of symbolic labels and macros. Must have been amazing to do such fundamental work and then be able to see the field develop as it has now!
One of the computers he built had a "Stop machine and ring bell for operator attention" so I guess not every thing that he did has become fundamental to our field... merely many of them ;-)
blue "rootkit" ray
http://fuckbluray.com/
this article needs the rootkit tag
TFA omitted the original punched-cards which were strung together forming a chain and used to program weaving operations in a programmable loom. The earliest cards dated to about 1725 (and replaced punched paper tape!), while the more successful Jacquard cards dated to about 1800, and were the inspiration for Hollerith's decks of punched cards. Babbage planned on using Jacquard cards to input programs/data to his analytic engine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Magnetic cards: Sometime in the early 1970s IBM produced a card made of magnetic material about the same size as a punch card. It held 66 tracks and 80 bytes per track. It could be inserted into a unit attached to a Selectric typewriter. One typewritten page could be captured as a stepper motor moved the recording head for each keystroke and advanced to the next track for every carriage return. Playback could reprint an entire card onto one page, or just one track for a single line, or one character at a time. I still have a couple of them.
And there were the magnetic cards about the size of a stick of chewing gum used on the HP programmable calculators. Two tracks with a couple hundred bytes per track, to hold either programs or numeric data.
And HP had another way to program their calculators. An optical wand that could be passed over barcodes. A set of peel off sticky bar codes for each calculator function came with the calculator wand. You'd peel off the ones for your program and stick them onto wax paper. Edits required only peeling and moving the stickers, or scissors and tape. When finished you'd pass the wand over the barcodes (gotta hold it straight, a ruler helped) to read in the program. To distribute your program, put the barcodes on a photocopier and print.
Of course there were/are many other barcode technologies, but I'll stop here.
No Cartridge based CDROMs? I remember those as a kid even. Skipped a bunch of floppy formats, 5.25" Double pack disks that i recently tossed out. Where were the WORM disks and other fun optical medias that I didnt have as a kid, but read about and saw used in my highschool even!
Typical maximum pc :(
10 INPUT "What is your name: ", U$ : PRINT "Hello "; U$ : INPUT "How many Libraries of Congress do you want: ", N : PRINT N : END
So long as you don't use branches, your line length is virtually unlimited. And it executes faster too :)
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
During the late 80's and 90's the Syquest removable cartridges base drives dominated removable storage. 44 and 88 GB!
MO disks were the other option, 3.5" 128mb and 5.25" 640mb