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Your next build may very well come configured with dual-SSD drives in a RAID 0 array for the OS, a gluttonous 2TB SATA HDD for storage duties, and a Blu-ray optical drive for movie watching and HD backups. And for quick transfers from one rig to another, does it get any sweeter than a 64GB USB thumb drive loaded with all of your favorite apps? Such a storage scheme is certainly worthy of dream machine status, but our storage options weren't always as fanciful, fast, and fat as they are today. Some of you may remember toting a 3.5-inch floppy to and from school, while others hearken all the way back to cassette tapes. And if you've lived long enough to remember the IBM Punch Card first hand, just ask and we'll SPEAK LOUDER.
Fasten your seatbelt and take a trip back in time with us as we follow the evolution of computer storage from its earliest days, all the way up to now.
Data storage no longer grows on trees, but that hasn't always been the case. We have to set our DeLorean for the 18th century to witness the birth of punch cards, which consisted of hard card stock with punched holes to represent data. In 1881, Herman Hollerith, who would later form IBM, designed a paper punch machine to tabulate census date. It had taken the U.S. Census Bureau eight years to complete the 1880 census, but thanks to Hollerith's invention, that time was reduced to just one year. The format really came into its own as a data processing technology in the 1900s, and by 1937, IBM was churning out up to 10 million punch cards each day. The paper-based storage medium remained prominent up until the 1970s before giving way to magnetic tape.
Approximate Years in Use: 1725 - 1975
Maximum Capacity: 960 bits
Similar to punch cards, paper tape contained patterns of holes to represent recorded data. But unlike its rigid counterpart, rolls of paper tape could feed much more data in one continuous stream, and it was incredibly cheap to boot. The same couldn't be said for the hardware involved. In 1966, HP introduced the 2753A Tape Punch, which boasted a blistering fast tape pinch speed of 120 characters per second and sold for $4,150. Yikes!
(Image Credit: chss.montclair.edu)
Approximate Years in Use: 1846 - 1990s
Maximum Capacity: Up to a few dozen kilobytes before becoming impractical
Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, and magnetic tape all rose to prominence in the 1950s, and it was the latter that helped shape the recording industry. Magnetic tape also changed the computing landscape by making long-term storage of vasts amount of data possible. A single reel of the oxide coated half-inch tape could store as much information as 10,000 punch cards, and most commonly came in lengths measuring anywhere from 2400 to 4800 feet. 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. This helped prevent the media from ripping as it sped and up and slowed down.
(Image Credit: ModernMechanix.com)
Approximate Years in Use: 1951 - Present
Maximum Capacity: About 1TB
Long before flash-based MP3 players and CDs ever existed, music buffs carried around their groovy tunes on compact cassette tapes. It was Philips who introduced the medium first to Europe in 1963 and then to the U.S. one year later initially as a means for portable dictation. Not until the audio quality of music players improved did cassettes become popular for listening to music, ushering in the era of boom boxes and parachute pants (thanks M.C. Hammer). But even before D.J. Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince could be heard belting out "Parents Just Don't Understand," cassettes also scored a gig as an inexpensive storage medium for home PCs starting in the 1970s. A standard 90-minute cassette could store roughly 700KB of data per side, taking center stage on computers like the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, TRS-80, and others.
Approximate Years in Use: Early 1970s - late 1980s
Maximum Capacity: 1400KB
Comments are closed on this article
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January 13, 2012 at 3:26am
i've seen lots of paper tapes and punch cards in my dads room and they were always a mistery to me in childhood
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January 02, 2012 at 2:17am
I agree, I remember using 5.25 in the early 90's. Playing Oregon Train
on a green screen in computer class back in elementary school. My
nephew is 10 and does not even know what a floppy is. Some how that
storage held on for WAY to long, thank god for flash drives. Burning a
CD was never practical for moving pictures or music. My 1st MP3 I had
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April 14, 2011 at 9:25am
I was just browsing a dll search website when I started reading your article here. As a matter of fact I was just talking with a friend of mine about storage devices and how much they cost. In my country a 16GB USB stick costs about 40$ and an external USB 320GB HDD costs about 60-70$. Now you tell me: which one would you pay for in order to save data on?
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December 27, 2010 at 5:23am
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October 28, 2010 at 7:19am
For quick transfers from one rig to another, does it get any sweeter than a 64GB USB thumb drive loaded with all of your favorite apps? Such a storage scheme is certainly worthy of dream machine status.
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October 20, 2010 at 10:24am
paper tape contained patterns of holes to represent recorded data. But unlike its rigid counterpart rolls of paper tape could feed much more data in one continuous stream and it was incredibly cheap to boot.
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September 27, 2010 at 5:08am
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. VCP-410 Testking - 640-816 Testking
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while others hearken all the way back to cassette tapes. And if you've lived long enough to remember the IBM Punch Card first hand, just ask and we'll SPEAK LOUDER.
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April 30, 2010 at 2:11am
While Sun's StorageTek T10000 tape drive may seem out of place at this
spot in our timeline, we include it here to show the evolution of
magnetic storage, which is still used today. Introduced in 2006, the
T10000 can hold 500GB of data (the recently revised T10000B doubles the
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technology, which means it uses more tracks than tape heads. www.ordercomputer.com
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May 01, 2009 at 10:43am
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rmorr95295
March 09, 2009 at 12:21pm
And BetaMax? After all, cassette tapes (!!) were mentioned.
I worked for a company (Alpha Microsystems) that, for years, produced hardware that would copy data to video tape formats, using a standard analog video signal. Because the data was a video signal, any video format -- at the time, VHS or Beta -- could be used, and your backup drive was a standard VCR. The main disadvantages -- capacity (100-200Mb/cassette) and bandwidth (2.5 hours to back up 200 Mb) were not disadvantages at the time (early 80's), and were far outweighed by the low cost (+/- $200 for the "drive", and $5 or so for the "media") and reliability.
Kritikos
March 08, 2009 at 10:20am
Thanks for the article, but have alook at this Wikipedia site http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_core_memory . I know Ladys wich "knittet" them in the Factory (Siemens) by Hand
Old Graybeard John
March 07, 2009 at 4:29am
Back in the 1970s our neighbor's company was replacing their "IBM card" system with magnetic tape.
They gave us boxes of IBM cards. They burn extremely well, and were excellent tinder for starting fires in our fireplace or while camping.
I'm old enough to remember when the job that trade schools advertised on matchbooks/TV etc was "keypunch operator."
And I'm only 48.
judithh
March 06, 2009 at 7:08pm
I am aware of at least one company still using a punched card system for billing in Feb. 2009. Some technology os more durable than others,
sophistem
March 06, 2009 at 3:55pm
Totally left out Bubble Memory. It's just as unique as any of the other major memory storage techniques. It was set to SAVE THE WORLD, but then super magneto resistance drives and the cheap densities won the day. I still have a laptop that uses it.
Ubik
March 06, 2009 at 2:39pm
You also neglected to mention the holographic disc drives with a base capacity of 300GB. They are supposed to be going up to 1.6TB per disc, but have been slow to be adopted and developed.
anonuser
March 06, 2009 at 1:51pm
MC Hammer wore "Hammer Pants". If you want to thank someone for Parachute pants, you should thank the break dancers of the early 80s, not MC Hammer and his "Hammer Pants" of the early 90s (assuming Hammer Don't Hurt Em is the beginning of MC Hammer's mainstream popularity, and thus ignoring his earlier work in the late 80s). As a child of the 80s, I am deeply disturbed by this article's "error".
Keith E. Whisman
March 08, 2009 at 8:31am
MC Hammer is now a preacher with his own congregation. If you want to meet him and talk to him look up his congregation and visit his church. He is a pretty good preacher.
Besides MC Hammer who is an actual success at preaching the word of God I've seen some has beens try it like Mr. T that flopped and alos DeBoe that also flopped and Kurt Russel that didn't even finish his sermon when he quit.
My advice to actors and singers is to not end up like MC Hammer and PAY YOUR TAXES.
anonuser
March 06, 2009 at 12:27pm
Excellent article, but you left out the fatal flaw in the story of hte Zip disks: the click of death.
Although they were popular, just about every owner of a Zip disk that I ever knew experienced it. It killed your drive and destroyed your data.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_of_death
SAS Rover
March 06, 2009 at 11:02am
This article is interesting (and nostalgic) to read, but it is definitely not a definitive or accurate list.
As well as the Hollerith (80 column) card, there was it's replacement that didn't catch on many places, a smaller card with 100 columns but about 2" narrower. Also, many, many places used the Hollerith card beyond 1975 (as stated on the site) into the 80's.
Magnetic tape did not get it's due recognition and that as well as the Hollerith card, it predated the digital computer. Fritz Pfleumer invented the magnetic tape in 1928 in Germany. BASF was the first commercial manufacturer of magnetic tape. In 1951 Univac made use of magnetic tape, a year before IBM did. There were some interesting uses of mag tape over the years. I remember very well the 8" & 16" tape reels using 3/4" tape maintained by human tape librarians and later the "tape farms" with robotic librarians with 2" wide spools of tape on small spindles in a "honeycomb" system.
The author did not address hard drives. IBM introduced the first disc drive in 1956. I remember removable single disc hard drives in mid range machines like DEC's, HP's and IBM 1200's, as well as, the external multi plater hard drives on the IBM 360, 370 and 3090 mainframes.
Does anyone remember the Bernoulli drives of the 80s before Zip and Jaz drives? At that time we thought that was a gigantic amount of removable data storage.
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tortoiseandhare
March 06, 2009 at 9:03am
One device I haven't seen mentioned is the NCR CRAM drive. CRAM stood for Card Random Access Memory. The device was similar in size to an old mainframe tape drive, but instead of a spool of tape, the data was stored on a deck of 255 magnetic cards, each about 3" wide and 14" long. Each card in the deck had a series of notches on one end that was unique, and the entire deck would hang from a series of 8 half-moon shaped rods. The rods were mechanically manipulated so that just one of the 255 cards at a time would drop from the deck, go down a chute and position itself on a spinning drum, where it could be written or read. The card would remain on the drum until a gate was programatically opened, at which time the card would whoosh up the exit chute and around to the top of the deck, where it would rejoin the others. As you can imagine, there was a lot of air and noise involved when these were in operation. Each deck was held in a cartridge that compressed them together and enabled the deck to be easily hung on the rods. The cartridge could then be released and lifted away, allowing the airflow to spread the cards out so that they didn't stick to each other. A glass rod could be used to shake them up if necessary.
I operated a NCR 315 in the mid 60's with two of these devices, and occasionally two cards would drop at once, creating a terrible squeal when they both hit the drum. This would require a shutdown and extraction of the damaged cards, sometimes with needlenosed pliers. The damaged cards were replaced by notching blank cards with a hand held punch and replacing into the deck. If they had data on them, the card would be restored from like card in a backup deck. If there was no backup, well, too bad. When the company later converted to an IBM 360 mainframe, the only medium the two machines had in common was punched paper tape. We did a lot of punching and spooling during the conversion.
Google NCR CRAM for more information on these monsters.
PeteCal
March 06, 2009 at 8:08am
How about drum memory? A rolling drum with a magnetic head for each track. If your computer used 12 bit words, you had 12 heads to store and retrieve words in parallel. A lot faster than serial tapes.
Also, I built a LSI-11 based computer using an audio cassette tape drive from a car. Normally the max data rate would be 300 baud or so but I discovered the motor drive used only a few volts. I upped it to close to 12 volts so the tape ran a lot faster. Then I could record at 9600 baud.
And my Atari used 5 inch floppys.
PeteCal
wk
March 06, 2009 at 1:10am
Really great article, it remind me of many sweet memories;
my first computer: Zx spectrum using cassette recorder (waiting for 10 minutes loading, hold your breath and then TAPE LOADING ERROR)
then came Atari ST and Amiga using 3.5" flobby disks (loading 4 disks to run single application).
Funny thing is this article disclose person age!!
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Dave-O
March 05, 2009 at 9:09pm
A few that were left out:
Diablo Disk - 1.6MB fixed, 1.6MB removable. 10" hard aluminum media.
CDC Hawk disk drives. 5 MB fixed, 5 MB removable. 10" Aluminum media.
IBM/CDC and other multi-disk washing-machine style disks. 25 to 500 MB 10" aluminum media.
Fujitsu Eagle-style 8" winchester disks.
IPI 5" hard drives from CDC in 250 MB.
And others I can't remember either.
One that stands out is the VRC drum memory. Gotta love a storage device that thakes 30 minutes to spin down after the power is turned off.
-Dave-O
TheBrez
March 06, 2009 at 6:32am
Before the introduction of the LS-120 there was also the Floptical. Roughly 20MB capacity on a 3.5" disk. SGI used them in the Indy and Indigo2 models and they were also available for PCs.
jtgd
March 05, 2009 at 7:06pm
How could they forget DDS (DAT) tapes? I had one when they were just 2GB back in the late 90's, and I believe they are still in use today.
Paul Braden
March 05, 2009 at 5:12pm
Wow...this is a great article. It brings back so many good memories. Please print more articles like this!
bobjr94
March 05, 2009 at 3:05pm
The problem with these kids now a days and there fancy dvd's and blu rays is they are not durable at all and they are to big.You cant hardly put a cd,dvd, blu ray,etc... in your pocket, maybe a coat pocket, but its not really very convent. Then they are very easily scratched, cds still kind of play with scratches, dvds are more picky and I have had blu rays that skip or get stuck and I can not even see the scratchs. I remember the old game cartrages, for nintendo or sega, they can sit on the floor for years, get stepped on, pop stilled on them, carry them in your pocket for a month and they still work. Hopefully with in a few years we move to all solid state storage. So when you goto the store and buy an album or movie, it will come in a flash card or drive of some type. No moving parts to break or wear out either on your media player.
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dc10ten
March 05, 2009 at 3:14pm
why would you want to carry those around for? There are definatly portable storage solutions out there, DVD and BluRay certainly weren't geared towards that.
jfcarpenter
March 05, 2009 at 2:39pm
The IBM magnetic tape, in the reel format as shown in the picture, actually only had a capacity of 170 megabytes, at 6250 BPI and a length of 2400 feet. I don't know where the 1 terabyte number came from but it doesn't apply to the standard 9-track reel tape.
