How you store your data has certainly changed dramatically over the years. I first saw a computer in 1972 at Virginia Tech. Our storage was all on punch cards. Hundreds and hundreds of them! They had to be stored in the correct order. I still have nightmares of dropping my “decks” of cards. Cards could get bent, frayed or just torn. Bye Bye data!
My first PC, the venerable Apple IIe, came with a 5.25 inch floppy disk drive. Invented by Alan Shugart at IBM in 1971, the floppy disk was a great advance over the cassettes and tapes used on Tandy and Commodore PCs. The disk was actually flexible and could store 160,000 bits of information (160K). The disk used the principle of magnetic digital storage. A drive head (read here as a magnet) would be placed close to a fast revolving disk of tape material. Magnetized ferric oxide on the tape material would either be charged or not (thus the 0 or 1). You could store tens of programs (that you had to write). What a concept!
My first IBM PC had a 10MB hard disk drive as well as 2 floppy disk drives. We thought we were in storage heaven. We could save all our WordStar and Lotus 1-2-3 files on the hard drive and back them up on the floppies. Hard disks were actually invented in 1956, but were so expensive that they didn’t reach popular use until the advent of the IBM PC. They stored a lot, but were terribly unreliable. The disks spun at incredible rates and the least quiver of the magnetic heads would cause the dreaded head crash (certainly you have heard of a hard disk crash!). Lots of data disappeared if you didn’t have it backed up.
The 80s brought the 3.5” floppy disk. This was actually a flexible disk covered with a hard plastic cover and could store 720 K on per disk. It was small, compact and was way more cool then the older, bigger and smaller capacity 5.25” kind. Apple was first to introduce the 3.5” disk, but it was soon picked up by IBM on their ill fated PS2. Later in the 80s the capacity of the 3.5” floppy was doubled to 1.44 MB (where its stays at today).
Floppies, because they run at so slow speeds, are many times more reliable then hard drives. A generation of computer users came to depend on the floppy for their data. Now back in the 80s, 1.44MB was a lot of storage. Your average WordPerfect or Word document was just about 20K in size. Over the years demands for bigger files (think digital pictures and music files) caused the death of the 3.5” floppy. They just weren’t big enough.
Also invented in the 80s was the CD-Rom drive. The CD uses optical (Laser) technology to store digital data. A portable hard drive if you will. The improvement over music records made the world change its listening habits. Soon to follow was the recordable CD for PC. Storing an unheard of 700MB, the CD soon became the backup storage medium of choice in the 90s.
I haven’t forgotten the oldest backup medium, tape. The first IBM 360 monster Computer we had at Virginia Tech ran all our data on big wheel Tape drives. Tape has been used over the years as a backup up system till today. I have ALWAYS, disliked tape because of its sequential nature. It takes lots of time to recover data and tape can stretch over repeated usage. Let’s just say it exists and hopefully soon will be gone!
Tomorrow we’ll talk about the latest in storage technology.
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