Punched cards
Punched cards are paper cards invented in the 1890s and used to punch a hole by hand or the punching machine. The holes are representing data and instructions. In practice, the IT guy would write a program by hand, convert it to a series of punched cards that are later loaded into the punch card reader to input data from the card into a computer. The computer would execute the code.
They could store 80 columns of data which is equal to 112.5 bytes of data, each column representing one character of a text line. A box of punch cards can hold 2000 cards. They are also known as Hollerith cards or IBM cards.
They were used in data processing applications and control automated machinery. The SAGE air defense system used 62 500 punched cards which is equal to around 5 MB of data. 37.3% of voters in the U.S. 1996 Presidential election used the punch card systems. Although many U.S. punch card systems are being replaced by more advanced systems, many voters still used them until 2012.
Magnetic Drum
42 years later, in 1932, Gustav Tauschek, an Austrian pioneer of Information technology developed numerous improvements for punched card-based calculating machines and invented magnetic drums. A magnetic drum is a metal drum coated with a ferromagnetic recording material. It used to read and write stationary heads that could recognize 0 and 1.
The first mass-produced computer, the IBM 650, had about 8.5 kilobytes of drum memory (later doubled to about 17 kilobytes in the Model 4). Tauschek’s original drum memory had a capacity of about 500 000 bits (62.5 kilobytes).
Magnetic drums were widely used in the 1950s and 1960s as computer memory. At that time, it was common to refer to computers as drum machines. The manufacturing of drums ceased in the 1970s.
Williams-Kilburn Tubes
Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn, both English inventors, wanted to solve a challenge and offer the first high-speed electronic memory. They did it by inventing Williams-Kilburn Tubes in 1947. It was the first random-access storage device that used a cathode ray tube (as in a TV) to store bits as dots on the screen’s surface. Electrostatic memory tubes could store 512 to 2048 bits of data as dots on the screen.
Some early computers in the United States also used Williams tubes, including the IAS machine (originally designed for Solectron tube memory), the UNIVAC 1103, IBM 701, IBM 702, and the Standards Western Automatic Computer (SWAC). Furthermore, the engineers implemented them in Soviet Strela-1 and the Japan TAC (Tokyo Automatic Computer).
Magnetic core memory
George Devol and An Wang developed the first magnetic core memory (random access memory) in 1955. Core memory uses rings of hard magnetic material as transformer cores. Each core can store one bit of information. The core doesn’t need the power to retain data, it can be permanently magnetized either clockwise or anti-clockwise. As it was developed, the core shrank from c.2mm to c.0-4mm, the initial speed of 200 kHz was increased to over 1 Mhz. A 32 x 32 core memory plane can store 1024 bits (128 bytes) of data.
Hard Disk Drive (HDD)
We all know hard disk drives. It is an electro-mechanical device that stores and retrieves data using magnetic storage and rotating platters coated with magnetic material. IBM introduced the first hard disk in 1956 with 3.75 MB. Today you can buy disks with a capacity of more than 18 TB per single hard disk, smaller, faster, and with a longer lifespan. There are dozens of companies that are producing hard disks today, and some of them are WD, Seagate, Toshiba, Hitachi, and others.
8” Floppy disk
In 1971 8″ floppy disks was introduced to the market by IBM to replace punch cards. First floppy disks came out with 30kb capacity. Single disk could replace about 3000 punch cards. Few years later larger capacity 500KB Double Sided Single Density was developed. Floppy disks was a read only storage device and cost around $5.
5.25” floppy disk
The 5.25-inch floppy disk was developed in 1976. It was a new generation of 8-inch floppy disk. 5.25 disk was much cheaper and smaller and became a fast replacement to his predecessor. It was coming in 4 different capacities:
Single-sided, 8 sectors/track: 160 KB
Single-sided, 9 sectors/track: 180 KB
Double-sided: 360 KB
High-Density (HD): 1.2 MB
Compact Disk (CD)
Phillips and Sony joined the strengths and produced the first Digital Audio Compact Disc for storing and playing audio in 1982. The initial CD had a 120 mm diameter and was able to hold 74 minutes of uncompressed stereo audio or about 650 MB of data. That was later extended to 80 minutes and 700 MB of data. The Mini CD had a diameter of 60 to 80 mm and it could store up to 24 minutes of audio or delivering device drivers (still used nowadays).
The format was later adapted to CD-ROM, CD-R (write-once), CD-RW (rewritable media), and a few other formats not very much popular nowadays.
By 2007, CD’s vendors sold around 200 billion CDs worldwide.
3.5” floppy disk
The 3.5-inch floppy disk created by IBM in 1984. It was the last mass-produced format, replacing 5.25-inch floppy disks. It was more durable than previous floppy formats since the packaging was rigid plastic with a sliding metal shutter
Magnetic tape cartridge
In 1984 IBM introduced a 4″x5″ protective case, that contained a 1/2″ single reel chromium dioxide tape. Capacity of the cartridge was 200MB. 2 years later using data compression technology allowed to increase the capacity to 400MB.
Cloud storage
Even though cloud storage was invented earlier, it started getting popular only in 1990.
Cloud storage allows users to store their data remotely. Data can be accessed via the Internet. With fast-growing download/upload speed, cloud storage is a trend now. Regular backups allowed users to avoid data loss and recovery situations.
A solid-state drive (SSD)
The origins of Solid-State Drives (SSDs) dates from the 1950s. In 1991, SanDisk implemented the first based SSD in IBM, Amdahl, and Cray supercomputers. It could hold 20 MB of data. Around 2007, Fusion-io announced the first PCIe-based SSD. Today you can find consumer SSD with a capacity of 8TB.
SSD uses flash memory to store data, it doesn’t have a spinning disk and movable read and write heads as the hard disk and floppy disks. SSDs are faster, they run silently, and are more resistant to physical shock. You can connect SSD to a machine using the same data port as HDD, e.g. SATA I, SATA II, and SATA III. There is also a newer standard allowing higher speeds, mSATA, M.2, U.2, NF1 XFMEXPRESS, and EDSFF.
SSD has a limited lifetime number of writes, you can check them by sing vendors official website, e.g., Samsung Magician Software.
Zip drive
In 1994 Iomega introduced zip drive, removable floppy disk storage with capacity, first 100 MB, 250 MB, and then 750 MB. Compared to 3.5” / 1.44 MB floppy disks – that was an enormous evolvement. However, the ZIP drives never replaced 3.5”. The users or companies didn’t widely use them, because, at the same time, you could buy a hard disk with 500 MB or more capacity. It was just more convenient to go with hard disks as they were the future at that time.
CF cards
SanDisk manufactured the first CF (Compact Flash) cards and used them in portable devices such as digital cameras for recording audio and video (Canon, Nikon). You can also use them on a PC using a slot adapter or reader. The CF cards were based on the parallel bus (167 MBps) using UDMA 7. The maximum capacity at the time they were popular was 8 GB. SanDisk created CF cards back in 1994. They used them until 2008 and then introduced a new generation of CF cards.
Digital Video Disc (DVD)
Developed in 1995 and released in 1996, Digital Video Disc (DVD) was able to hold 4.7 GB of data which is six times more than CDs (700 MB). That wasn’t the end of the DVD’s story. Some companies developed DVDs with multiple layers that could hold even up to 17.08 GB of data (double-sided, double layer). Besides, you could also find DVDs that can handle 8.5 GB (single-sided, double-layer) and 9.4 GB (double-sided, single layer) of data. PlayStation 2 was the first video game console to run DVDs.
Jaz drive
Jaz drive was introduced by Iomega in 1995. Price was $99 for a1GB removable disk cartridge. Jaz disks had overhearing problem and often would stuck in the disk. reader. Forcing Jaz disk to eject always resulted in damaging it as well as a reader.
USB Flash Drive
USB was and is one of the most convenient portable storage devices. The first USB was released in 1999 and had followed a 1.0 and 1.1 standard. It could store up to 8 MB of data. Today you can buy a USB flash drive of up to 2 TBs followed by generation 3.1 which is 5 times faster than 2.0. There are dozens of companies producing USB flash drives, and some of the most popular are Kingston, Samsung, SanDisk, and others.
SD Card (Secure Digital)
The SD Association (SDA) developed a non-volatile portable memory card in 1999. The first SD cards were created between 1999 and 2002 and ranged from 32 MB to 64 MB. Later, companies developed different formats and extended capacity.
Blu-ray Optical Disc
Blu-ray Disc Association, a group representing makers of consumer electronics, introduced Blu-ray to supersede the DVD and store high-definition video (720p and 1080p). It is the same size as CD and DVD, but unlike CD and DVD, the reflection has a blue hue. Blu-ray Optical Disc can hold from 25 GB (single layer) to 128 GB of data (BDXL format).
We all use them today for distributing feature films and video games for the PlayStation and Xbox.
MicroSD card
Powered by the idea to create and use smaller SD cards, SanDisk created a microSD card in 2005. They extended capacity up to 128 MB. Motorola’s phone E395 was the first phone that used a microSD card. A few years later, competitors started using them on phones and other mobile devices. Several companies are producing microSD cards such as SanDisk, Samsung, Kingston, and others. Today you can buy a single microSD card with a capacity of more than 30 GB.
CFast cards
CFast cards are based on the serial interface (SATA) which means the speed of the CFast cards is equal to the speed of SATA ports (SATA I = 150 MBps, SATA II = 300 MBps, SATA III=600 MBps). Pretec introduced the first CFast card of 32 GB at CES (Consumer Electronics Show). Nowadays, you can handle more than 128 GB on a single CFast card. You can use them on cameras, audio, and video recorders.
XQD card
XQD card was developed by Sony corporation in 2012. When tested XQD card was showing 8 Gbit/s read and write speed. It was the fastest card at that moment, because of PCI express data transfer interface use.
CFexpress cards
The CompactFlash Association introduced a new CF standard based on PCIe 3.0. They also announced NVME. That resulted in producing a CFexpress card 1.0 in 2017 for speeds up to 2 Gbps. Two years later, in 2019, CompactFlash Association introduced CFexpress 2.0 (up to 4 Gbps). Today, CFexpress cards are available in capacity of 512 GB and used in audio and video recordings by Sony, Nikon, Canon, and others.
Decentralized cloud
Decentralized storage is a future of cloud storages. It using the blockchain technology. User’s data is encrypted and distributed across multiple locations.
