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!"

Comments

Incomplete

[fahrbot-bot]

The article fails to include the Library of Congress, to which all other storage mediums should be compared...

Re:Incomplete

[Farmer Tim]

A good metric in general, but in this case the first page would consist of a zero, a decimal point, and lots of other zeros followed eventually by a significant digit.

If I want to read a whole lot of nothing I'll go to Digg...

Re:Incomplete

[Bromskloss]

The article fails to include the Library of Congress, to which all other storage mediums should be compared...

You should see how much information there is at the Congress of Libraries!

Re:Incomplete

[Hatta]

It's nicer with metric prefixes.

Punch Card (960 bits) ~= 6 picoLOCs
Audio Tape (1400 kB) ~= 70 picoLOCs
Magnetic tape (35 kB) ~= 1.75 nanoLOCs
8" floppy (1.2 MB) ~= 60 nanoLOCs
5.25" floppy (1.2 MB) ~= 60 nanoLOCs
3.5" floppy ~= 72 nanoLOCs
SmartMedia (128 MB) ~= 6.4 microLOCs
LS-120 (240 MB) ~= 12 microLOCs
CD (700MB) ~= 35 microLOCs
Zip drive (750 MB) ~= 37 microLOCs
MiniDisc (1 GB) ~= 50 microLOCs
Jaz drive (2 GB) ~= 100 microLOCs
Magneto-optical drive (2.6 GB) ~= 130 microLOCs
Microdrive (8 GB) ~= 400 microLOCs
DVD (8.5 GB) ~= 425 microLOCs
Colorado backup (14 GB) ~= 700 microLOCs
HD-DVD (30 GB) ~= 1.5 milliLOCs
SD (32 GB) ~= 1.6 milliLOCs
Blu-ray (50 GB) ~= 2.5 milliLOCs
USB flash (64 GB) ~= 3.2 milliLOCs
Compact flash (100 GB) ~= 5 milliLOCs
IBM Magnetic Tape (1 TB) ~= 50 milliLOCs
T10000 Magnetic Tape (1 TB) ~= 50 milliLOCs
2.5" portable hard drive (1 TB) ~= 50 milliLOCs

Re:Incomplete

[Anonymous Coward]

Calculate the bandwidth of a guy walking - even slowly - across a computer room floor with a reel of mag tape under his arm.

Forgot one.

[Anonymous Coward]

Clay tablets. The oldest technology and most reliable to date.

Re:Forgot one.

[JustOK]

Clay tablets!?!?!? You young whipper-snappers with yer mobile devices. In my day we used a cave wall. Better resolution.

Back in my day...

[AKAImBatman]

...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

The Egyptians said it best:

[Anonymous Coward]

Bird : Bird : Giant Eye : Pyramid : Bird : Giant Eye : Dead Fish : Cat Head : Cat Head : Cat Head :

Re:The Egyptians said it best:

[Anonymous Coward]

+5 Informative to the first person to translate this.

Re:the good old days of data storage

[markana]

Yup, the line across the top trick saved me once or twice in High School. I moved from a school with PDPs and TTYs for the students to one with an 029 keypunch and daily trips to the computer building. Talk about a downgrade... But you quickly learn to protect your card stack.

On the last day of our Senior year, the computer geeks brought out the carefully-collected chad from the keypunch - and rained it down the 5-story main stairwells. I'll bet there's chad in there to this day...