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JOURNEY FROM PUNCH CARDS TO CLOUD STORAGE
Hundreds of gigabytes are not a matter of worry for us nowadays. But it was beyond imagination some decades ago.
- Punch cards were the first try at Data Storage in a machine language. In 1725 Basile Bouchon developed the punch card as a control for looms. The holes acted as on/off switches.
- Magnetic Drum Memory was founded in 1932 in Austria the mid-1950s, magnetic drum memory had a capacity of around 10 kB.
- The Hard Disk Drive was introduced in 1956 First HDD had 50 24-inch discs with a total capacity of 5 million characters (just under 5 MB). Nowadays HDD comes with up to 20TB. Nowadays, 1 and 2-TB HDDs are very common in personal computers and laptops.
- The Laserdisc was the predecessor to the CD-ROM and other optical storage. It was chiefly used for pictures. Commercially laserdisc system was first available in the year 1978. The discs could have up to 60 minutes of audio or video on each side.
- Magnetic Tape was first used in 1951. The tape device was called UNISERVO and it was the main I/O device on the UNIVAC-I computer. The effective transfer rate of the UNISERVO was about 7,200 characters per second. The tapes were metal and 1200 feet long and therefore very heavy.
- SSD (Solid State Drives) was launched in 1978. An SSD is a nonvolatile storage device that does everything a hard drive does. It stores data on interlinked flash memory chips. Nowadays it is most common in computers.
- CD-ROM was developed by Sony and Philips in 1982 for distributing music. In the year 1997, the Compact Disc Re-Writable (CD-RW) was introduced. This optical disc was then used for backing up data storage and transferring of files to various devices.
- The Digital Video Disc (DVD) format was introduced in 1995, and its storage capacity was hugely increased over the common compact disc (CD) while having the same dimensions. DVDs came in both read-only and read-write formats and were broadly accepted in the film industry for consumer releases of pictures.
- USB Flash drive was introduced in 2000. A plug-and-play data storage device that includes flash memory with an integrated Universal Serial Bus (USB) facility. Weighing very less USB flash drives are typically removable and rewritable. Similar to floppy discs, USB drives increased in data storage capacity over time and were instantly popular due to their portability.
- The Cloud🌥: John McCarthy introduced the concept of cloud computing in the year 1961. Amazon offered AWS in 2006 and the cloud started to take off. Now it's the preferred method of storage for many companies and its uptake is projected to grow significantly moving forward.
“Cloud storage is a cloud computing model that stores data on the Internet through a cloud computing provider who manages and operates data storage as a service. It’s delivered on demand with just-in-time capacity and costs, and eliminates buying and managing your data storage infrastructure.”-Amazon
For more about cloud storage:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_storage
This is a simple version of computer storage history. It is a vast topic. In this process of evolution, many more storage devices came. Many of them are not used anymore. They are now out of our sight. Hope this article has given you a little bit feeling of a nostalgic journey of storage devices.