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

The one-page version

[damn_registrars]

For those who don't want to go through several pages of ads, is here.

Jaz Drive

[Thelasko]

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.

Re:Jaz Drive

[Gat0r30y]

The Jaz was just a bad idea is all. It was basically just an HDD, but instead of a single integrated system, you separate the media from the heads. Why is this a terrible idea? 1) dirty media will destroy heads right quick. 2) allowing people to move the media around, and even encouraging such behavior astronomically increases the chances you are going to get something bad onto the media. 3) Once a head goes, the whole thing is gone. Without fancy new stuff that goes into the freshest HDD's, this can mean that once the head goes you drive it straight into the media, forever destroying it and causing a general mess. 4) Instead of a nice pretty clean room environment (HDD's are sealed in a clean room), you introduce a bunch of dirtyness and nasty environmental particles every time you put a new disk into the reader.

what about hard drives?

[wjh31]

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

Re:Incomplete

[gnick]

Crud. That big long post and I had GB == TB all the way through... The only places I had it right are where I screwed up TB v GB on both sides... To be fair, though, you mangled it too - 1.6/1000 != .16. Let's try that again:

Punch Card (960 bits) ~= 0.000000000006 LOCs
Audio Tape (1400 kB) ~= 0.00000000007 LOCs
Magnetic tape (35 kB) ~= 0.00000000175 LOCs
8" floppy (1.2 MB) ~= 0.00000006 LOCs
5.25" floppy (1.2 MB) ~= 0.00000006 LOCs
3.5" floppy ~= 0.000000072 LOCs
SmartMedia (128 MB) ~= 0.0000064 LOCs
LS-120 (240 MB) ~= 0.000012 LOCs
CD (700MB) ~= 0.000035 LOCs
Zip drive (750 MB) ~= 0.0000375 LOCs
MiniDisc (1 GB) ~= 0.00005 LOCs
Jaz drive (2 GB) ~= 0.0001 LOCs
Magneto-optical drive (2.6 GB) ~= 0.00013 LOCs
Microdrive (8 GB) ~= 0.0004 LOCs
DVD (8.5 GB) ~= 0.000425 LOCs
Colorado backup (14 GB) ~= 0.0007 LOCs
HD-DVD (30 GB) ~= 0.0015 LOCs
SD (32 GB) ~= 0.0016 LOCs
Blu-ray (50 GB) ~= 0.0025 LOCs
USB flash (64 GB) ~= 0.0032 LOCs
Compact flash (100 GB) ~= 0.005 LOCs
IBM Magnetic Tape (1 TB) ~= 0.05 LOCs
T10000 Magnetic Tape (1 TB) ~= 0.05 LOCs
2.5" portable hard drive (1 TB) ~= 0.05 LOCs

Better?

They missed the Sinclair "stringy floppy"

[SpinyNorman]

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.

IBM Reference

[HockeyPuck]

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

MaximumPC helps IBM disseminate misinformation

[metasonix]

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

No WInchester drives ?

[mbone]

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.