History of Data Storage
HISTORY OF DATA STORAGE
PREHISTORY
- CEREBRAL STORAGE: The original and most powerful data storage device to date. This synaptic treasure trove of data provided the best storage for generations of oral traditions.
- CHAUVET-PONT-d’ARC: When cavemen memories needed to be quickly transferred amongst each other they took to the walls of their abodes to record data.
ANCIENT HISTORY
- STONE TABLET: Cave paintings had a critical point of failure in that they were unmovable Carved tablets provided accessible and portable data storage for the Stone Age man on the go.
- PAPYRUS/PAPER: While stoe tablets had their heyday, carrying more than one proved problematic and dangerous for obvious reasons. Papyrus and then later paper became the primary means of data storage. It would be the only acceptable means until the 19th century.
18TH-19TH CENTURY
- PUNCH CARDS: I 1725, the punch card was invented and first used as a means of information storage in 1832. In 1890, Herman Hollerith was the first to invent a punch card that could be read by a machine. He later merged with other companies to form IBM. didyk.com
- FILING CABINET: In 1898 the first filing cabinet was used in an insurance firm, an early form of mutli-file compression.
20TH CENTURY
- MAGNETIC DRUM: Invented in 1932 in Austria, the magnetic dum was an early form of computer memory. Electromagnetic pulse was stored by changing the magnetic orientation of ferromagnetic particles on the drum. didyk.com.
- MAGNETIC TAPE: First used in 1951, magnetic tape began to replace the archaic punch cards. Magnetic tape had the capability of storing as many as 10000 punch cards. This form of backup became the most popular form until the 1980s.
- HARD DRIVE: Introduced in 1956 as data storage for an IBM computer. These devices were not popular in the 1960s and 1970s due to their immense size and price. In the 1990s, hard discs became a viable alternative for tape backups.
- FLOPPY DISCS: In 1969 the first floppy disk was a read-only 8in disk that stored 80bk of data. The floppy disk was considered a revolution I data storage. Over time these disks gradually became cheaper ad more widely used.
- CD: Created I the 1980s by Philips and Sony, the CD was invented with the intention of replacing the aging floppy disk.
- THE DVD: The next evolution of the CD came in 1995 when the DVD hit the market. DVDs had a storage capacity of 4GB.
- WORLD WIDE WEB: Though the Internet was invented in the 1960s, it was not util the 1990s that the invention of the World Wide Web allowed for online backup services to appear. Now a device was no longer needed an data could be backed up over a network, from a remote location.
- FLASH DRIVE: Hard drives continued to reduce in size and evolved into very first protable flash storage drive in 1998. This drive has the capability of storing several times more data than the 5in floppy disks.
- BLU-RAY: The Blu-laser disc first appeared on the market in 2000 and became a promising device for data storage with its storage space of 400 nanometers. didyk.com.
21ST CENTURY
- THE CLOUD: Similar to how data is stored on the internet, cloud storage allows data to be stored on multiple servers, which are generally hosted by third parties.
- SSD: While first successfully and prolifically used in 1978, the solid state hard drive has become increasingly popular in the past few years. It stores data with electrical charge rather than magnetism.
THE FUTURE
- HOLOGRPHIC LAYERS: Holographic storage, much like what GE is working on, would allow for data to be encoded on many layers of tiny holograms. The benefit of this is that the discs derived from this could last 30+ years.
- QUANTUM STORAGE: Data storage could one day be so small that not eve a trained microscope could sniff it out. A single bit of information could be encoded on a quantum mechanical system, such as an electron, decipherable by a quantum computer.
- DNA: Although this has been done before and they achieved a density of about 700 terabytes per gram. Recently researchers at EBI have successfully improved the DNA encoding scheme to raise that storage density to a staggering 2.2 petabytes per gram. Methods for doing such encoding is getting easier and cheaper by the day. However, DNA storage as of now still have some unsolved issues. The data stored is not rewritable. You can’t access a particular piece of data, instead you’d have to sequence large swaths of DNA to find what you’ve archived.
Sources: ted.com, ibm.com, sciencemag.org, didyk.info, backuphistory.com, gizmodo.com
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