When we talk about information storage we have to go back to the first forms of writing. However, if the storage of information is to process it with some machine, then it is only necessary to go back to the Industrial Revolution, when it was proposed to use the steam engine in looms. To do this, Basile Bouchon devised a way to encode and store the patterns or drawings of the fabrics on punched cards, a mechanism perfected shortly after by Joseph Marie Jacquard.
In this context, around 1820 Charles Babbage designed the Analytical Engine, precursor of the modern computer, for the reliable calculation of mathematical tables. The Analytical Engine used Jacquard punch cards for data entry. The calculation program that Ada Byron published for this machine made her the first programmer in history.
At the end of the 19th century, punched cards were successfully used in the automatic preparation of the US census and represented the basis for entering information into computers designed until the 1970s of the 20th century.
In the context of the first electronic computers, in the mid-20th century, the construction of high-capacity storage devices and fast access was quite a challenge. Williams’ tubes, based on cathode ray tubes, were a first attempt.
In the 50s, magnetism began to be used as the basis for recording information, first on soft media such as tapes and then on other rigid ones such as drums and discs. The principle is simple: a layer of magnetizable material is spread on a surface and the information is recorded in the form of small magnetic dipoles. The UNIVAC I computer, from 1951, incorporated tape drives that could store up to 128 units or words per inch.
The drum soon appeared, cylindrical in shape, with a capacity of around ten thousand words, but it was surpassed by hard drives, faster and more efficient. In a hard drive, the magnetic material is spread over several circular platters that rotate at high speed. For each magnetic surface there is a head that allows the reading and writing of information. The first hard drive was the IBM 350, marketed in 1956, with a capacity of just over four million words of information. Over time, continuous improvements in magnetic technology made cheap, high-capacity hard drives available for all kinds of computers.
Despite the disadvantage of the sequential access of tapes compared to the speed of hard drives, their lower price and greater capacity and adaptation as support for backup copies, made them the storage technology of the large mainframes and minicomputers of the second half of the 20th century and, surprisingly, are still present in some 21st century computer systems, although their use is beginning to decline.
Compact and convenient cassette tapes enabled the expansion of home computing during the 1980s. These tapes were replaced by floppy disks, which essentially use the same technology as hard drives but have a lighter, less rigid media. , with less storage capacity, but easily transportable.
In the 1990s, a support with optical technology appeared: the compact disc or CD, an acronym for Compact Disk. Despite their larger storage capacity, they initially had the disadvantage of being read-only devices. For this reason, other types of short-lived flexible disks continued to be developed: Sony’s minidisc, or Iomega’s Zip and Jaz, are some examples, with capacities ranging from 100 MB to 1 GB.
At the end of the 1990s, flash technology appeared, a non-volatile electronic storage medium. Initially developed for photography, it enabled the development of very compact storage devices which, although initially very expensive, soon far exceeded the capabilities of optical technology. In this way, since the beginning of the 21st century, solid state drives or SSDs have facilitated the gradual replacement of magnetic hard drives in all types of computers. Using flash technology, these drives reduce power needs and increase transfer speeds.
Interestingly, the last great advance in storage systems is not due to a technological development in this area, but in the field of computer networks. Indeed, the appearance of high-speed networks has allowed the creation of large computer centers focused on data storage, such as documents, photographs, videos, etc. Colloquially known as “the cloud”, it is essentially a storage space built from a huge number of devices connected to each other and accessible through a network connection. Obviously, this is not the last step in evolution… what will be the next?