History
of storage in computing started with punch card, Magnetic Tape. refers
to some of the components that make up a computer to retain data for a
specified period. History of storage in Computing, if we mean non
volatile data storage, that has developed and grown in way that we
simply could not have imagined back in the days of the first hard drive
in 1956. At the time, the first hard drive was from IBM and has been a
history of storage in computing with its capacity 4.4MB of actual data.
The hard drive was designated to hold 5 MB of data.
History of storage in Computing : The Initial Growth
In
this article on History of storage in Computing, we will consider only
the Secondary storage and Tertiary Storage, Primary Storage, like
Processor Cache, RAM will not be discussed in this article. LaserDisc
technology which first appeared in 1958, and was developed by Philips,
MCA, and Pioneer but was not available commercially until 1978. These
were for storage of video and image data in more reliable manner versus a
hard disk. Laserdisc was marketed in 1978 in North America, with the
popular name DiscoVision.
The Compact Disc or CD followed the
LaserDisc. CDs were developed in 1979 by Sony and Phillips and were
available commercially in 1982 after, which is historically 93 years
after the first Gramophone record. CD was originally designed to hold
sound recordings, but later they were developed to include data storage.
A standard CD can hold up to 700MB of data.
History of storage in Computing : The Rapid Change
There
was a quiescent period before development of DVD or digital versatile
disc, which is a CD with different laser technology. It uses an infrared
light to store more data on the same amount of space as a CD. Around
since 1995, dual layer DVDs can store up to 8.5 GB of data. Blu-ray was
the next step from DVD. Commercially available from 2006, Blu-ray discs
use blue laser wavelengths and can store much more than CDs or DVDs. A
single layer Blu-ray disc can store up to 25GB and dual layer ones up to
twice that.
Apart from CD, DVDs, Flash drives were introduced in
2000 and can store up to 256GB of data. These USB key plug-in drives
have revolutionized portable storage. You can get them in all kinds of
novelty shapes too. This is the short history of storage in computing
for removable media.
Now the most important part of History of
storage in computing is the development and marketing of desktop, laptop
and server computer’s Hard Disk Drive. We already have published
articles on the structure and function of HDD, the standard has changed,
the capacity has changed.
Today, the choice of storage for data is
immense. Whether you have a network hard drive or use cloud-based
storage, it is a world away from the early days of data storage in the
late 1950s.
