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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!"
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 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
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.
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.
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
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_loom
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Yeah - those early "storage" media were more than just for transporting your program around. They were also patchable. Fixing typos on punched cards was always fun - you fed a fresh card into the machine and held down the auto-repeat duplicate button which sounded like a machine gun as it sucked in the old/new cards and punched the new one up to the point of the error where you'd start typing again. I loved that noise!
I also remember burning programs onto EPROMs for early machines like the BBC Micro or embedded projects. You could edit those to a limited extent too... rather than so back and fix the source and reassemble for minor changes you'd just load the bad ROM image into the EPROM programmer and patch the hex directly and burn a new one...
Get the fuck off my lawn you whippersnappers!
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
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.
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 :)