We left off yesterday with the arrival of the CD-ROM drive (bonus point if you know what the initials stand for). We skipped over the invention of the first high capacity floppy disk drives. Iomega invented the Bernoulli drive (same name as our black cat!) that could hold 10MB. It was big (8” diameter) but you could carry it around without worry of a head crash. The same technology was shrunk to 5.25” and 44MB size then to the 100MB ZIP drive. This technology PEAKED with the 750MB 3.5” Zip drive in the late 90s. Many of our customers still use Zip drives for data backup.
Here is the answer to the CD-ROM question: Compact Disc read-only memory.
From CD-ROM we got the CD-R which you could write just one time to the CD-RW that you could write multiple times. The weakness of the CD-RW is that there was NEVER a standard picked for the data writing. So CD-RWs were limited to the PC you initially wrote them on. Storage capacity maxed out at 700MB.
Next on the line was the DVD drive with its various incarnations. Invented to replace VCRs DVDs eventually found themselves on most PCs. The DVD started out with 4.7GB of memory and now is up to 8.5GB with dual layer technology. The DVD is a CD on steroids. It uses a different frequency laser to mark and read smaller optical pits on the disk. There are no fewer then 7 different standards for DVD. Fortunately the latest DVD burners, burn and read all the different standards.
Our favorite technology is the Flash Ram memory chips. These chips can hold what ever has been written to them indefinitely. The use of electrons is used for the digital 0 and 1s. With no mechanical parts, flash memory is the ultimate in reliability and safety. I love my USB flash drives. They are small and hold a lot. I truly believe that they will end the use of hard drives for PCs in the near future. Without flash RAM we would have never reached mega pixel digital cameras, micro portable MP3 players, and mobile phones that do more then just dial a number.
So what is coming up in the future of storage? On the horizon is Blue Ray technology which is 10 times more storage then a DVD. Also Holographic Versatile Disks that can hold even more are coming. Flash drives that hold your entire PC will also change the size of everything in computing.
Happy day!
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