We will see the creation of one of the first forms of exclusively
computer storage. Herman Hollerith was interested in assisting the
United States Government develop a more efficient way to process their
census data, something which previously took several years to do.
Hollerith developed a punch card system which could be read by a computer to process the data held on a single card.
The mechanism worked
by pressing the punch card between two brass rods; as the punch card
was fed into the machine, an electric current would be passed between
the exposed holes in the paper, translating into a computational value.
While punch cards are a world apart from modern storage, they qualify as
the precursor all the same, especially considering that punch cards
were the chosen form of computer storage for nearly a century.
David Paul Gregg's Optical Disc
The
first optical disc was patented in 1958 by David Paul Gregg. The
optical disc is one of the most enduring forms of data storage. The
first optical disc couldn't hold more than a few megabytes of data.
Optical media is available in several formats, including CD, DVD, and
Blu-Ray. Optical media is unique in the mechanism of its data writing
and reading abilities.
Optical media is placed onto a disc using either a
high-powered laser or stamping machine which embeds data in the form of
pits and lands on a very thin layer of reflective metallic material.
This data is then read using a laser diode, which beams light onto the
pits and lands, reading a binary code depending on the reflection of the
light.
IBM's Hard Drive
The first
functioning hard drive was the size of a large refrigerator and couldn't
store more than four megabytes of data. Nowadays, you can store several
terabytes of data on a drive no larger than a toaster. Hard drives work
by writing data to a magnetically receptive disk, allowing for easy
writing, retrieval, and overwriting. Magnetic hard drives have been
adopted as the most common form of computer data storage.
Innovations
Optical
and magnetic media have maintained popularity in recent decades, each
seeing innovations and reinventions which allow for further use. A Plasmon Jukebox allows for automatic disc transfer, speeding up the process of data
writes and reads for optical optimized data archive applications. A
solid state hard drive removes the volatility of a traditional hard
drive's moving components.
