Post on 28-Jan-2015
description
A Brief History of Backup and Storage
Punch Card
Punch Tape
Magnetic Tape
Tape Drive
Hard Drive
Floppy Disk
1775 19511846 1952 1956 1971 1985
Computer-Readable CD-ROM
1972
Cassette
PUNCH CARDIn common use until mid-1970s, when replaced by magnetic tape
Used as early as 1725 in textile industry for controlling mechanized textile looms
Approximate Years in Use: 1725 - 1925
PUNCH TAPE
Approximate Years in Use: 1846 - 1990s
Originally pioneered by textile industry for use with mechanized looms
Each row on tape represented one character
MAGNETIC TAPEFirst used in 1951 to record computer data on the Eckert-Mauchly UNIVAC I
Tapes were metal and 1200 feet long (365 meters) and very heavy
Long length made it prone to tears and breaks
Approximate Years in Use: 1951- present
TAPE DRIVEIntroduced in 1952 by IBM
Used vacuum columns to buffer nickel-plated magnetic tape to prevent media from tearing
Some tapes were 1,200 feet long
Replaced equivalent of 12,500 punch cards
Capacity of 2 million digits per tape
Approximate Years in Use: 1951- present
HARD DRIVEFirst hard disk drive, IBM Model 350 Disk File, shipped in 1956 with IBM 305 RAMAC computer.
Computer itself was 30’ by 50” (9m x 15m); storage device itself—the first commercial hard disk drive– was a 1.5-meter cube.
Approximate Years in Use: 1956- present
FLOPPY DISKFirst floppy disk released by IBM in 1971. Read-only, 8″ in diameter, stored 80 kB
Intended as portable, more reliable medium vs punched cards, magnetic tape
8” disks too large for new microcomputers of 1970s, so 5¼” disk created; 3½” floppy followed
Approximate Years in Use: 1971- 1982 (8” & 5 ¼”) 1982-2009 (3 ½”)
CASSETTE
Approximate Years in Use: 1972 to late 1980s
Introduced for audio use by Philips in Europe in 1963
Introduced in 1972 as storage medium for PCs
Standard 90-minute cassette stored 700KB of data per side
Used on ZX Spectrum, TRS-80, Commodore 64, and others
COMPUTER-READABLE CD-ROM
Approximate Years in Use: 1985- present
Optical disc invented in 1958; first commercial product, Laserdisk, introduced in 1978
First audio compact disc introduced in 1982; eventually obsoleted magnetic tape
Computer-readable data-storing CD-ROMs introduced in 1985.
By late ’90s, CD-ROM disks and drives had obsoleted floppies