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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.
...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
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
Clay tablets!?!?!? You young whipper-snappers with yer mobile devices. In my day we used a cave wall. Better resolution.
rewriting history since 2109
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 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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.