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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!"
You're assuming Blu-Ray disks will continue to have only one or two layers. However, 8 and 16 layer disks have been produced, and would be readable by any current Blu-Ray player with a firmware update.
Pioneer produced a 16 layer, 400 GB disk a few months ago, and they're attempting to produce a 1 TB disk by 2013.
Also, I dispute your claim that there is not much difference between 480p and 1080p video. The detail level on some Blu-Ray's is simply staggering (e.g. Dark Knight, Planet Earth, Lost S04). Differences are especially apparent on animated content where production is all digital.
For example, Wall-E and Ratatouille look amazing.
It is far superior in color reproduction, vibrancy, and detail than DVD. There's also the benefit of lossless audio. Most Blu-Rays now come with lossless 24/48 khz tracks 5.1 or 7.1 tracks. This is significantly superior to the 448 kbit Dolby Digital tracks provided on most DVDs.
Source: Wikipedia
"In December 2008, Pioneer Corporation unveiled a 400 GB Blu-ray disc, which contains 16 data layers, 25 GB each, and will be compatible with current players after a firmware update. A planned launch is in the 2009-2010 time frame for ROM and 2010-2013 for rewritable discs. Ongoing development is under way to create a 1 TB Blu-ray disc as soon as 2013.[92]."
I'm not saying it didn't happen to him (it is a good urban myth), but there were tools and procedures available to prevent it. Punched cards (for Fortran programs at least) had a sequence field in the last 8 columns for sorting decks, and usually you'd draw a diagonal line across the top of the card stack with a marker so that you could manually resort them if a sorter wasn't available.
If you look at the layout for a fortran program, you'll see that it was heavily influenced by the punched card layout, or vice-versa.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
NOT an urban legend. Happened to me with a 550 card program at Mizzou in 1975. I was running through the halls to go get it punched on the auto-collator (I think that's what it was called- a machine that punched the extra columns on the right (73 through 80) in sequence so you could resort the cards. And I tripped, and the cards went flying.
Fortunately I had a printout because I'd just run the program, so I just went back and keypunched the whole damn thing. And left the cards in the hall. I was a faster typist than a sorter.
And when data CDs first came out (mid-80s), they stored several times more than a high-end hard drive. Somewhere along the way, optical media fell far, far behind.
For me the issue is not the technical merits of the blu-ray discs, it's the fact that as a distribution format for movies, they are loaded up with the most asinine DRM that I could possibly imagine. I recently built a new home PC and thought I'd finally take the plunge and buy the newest media and I got a blu-ray player for it. Since I don't own a television, I was looking forward to watching blu-ray movies on my monitor. As I discovered however, my monitor is DVI so I wasn't allowed to actually watch my legally purchased blu-ray movies on my legally purchased blu-ray player. Wow... To boot, I like to run linux and I couldn't get dumphd to run so to watch movies I have to buy each one, copy it to the hard drive while stripping it of DRM using the windows program anyDVD, and then I can watch it using linux. Wow, what a load of crap! Somebody needs to take a class action suit against whoever is pushing this HDCP nonsense.
While there isn't any real connection between blu-ray as a distribution medium and blu-ray as a storage medium, if I find the standard blu-ray movies repulsive, I don't care what the technical merits of the disc are, I'm going to avoid it like the plague. I swear I'm not buying another blu-ray disc until this DRM HDCP virtual engine nonsense is removed (or reverse-engineered) and the movies play on linux and play easily.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
You could hear his anguish miles away!
The only significant risk would be losing or damaging a card. A damaged card would have to be repunched.
The MOST POPULAR program on the mainframe was SORT. It would take a "shuffled deck" (out of order program deck) and sort it back into order. That program got ran quite a few times a day, every day. So getting your deck shuffled really wasn't that big of a deal. More dramatic than damaging.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.