Media Evolution: About Punch Cards, Magnetic Films and Floppy Disks
Hi Geektimes! Usually in our blog we talk about new products and technologies of OCZ. However, today we will talk about how data storage technologies have evolved over the entire history of their existence, which has more than 200 years.
Our story begins, of course, with punch cards. Many people mistakenly believe that punch cards are the discovery of the 20th century, however, this is not so. The first punch cards appeared at the beginning of the XIX century and were used in a loom created by the French inventor Joseph Marie Jacquard.
So, what did Jacquard invent. In the 19th century, fabric production was a rather labor-intensive process, but at its core it was a constant repetition of the same actions. Having a huge background of experience as a machine adjuster, Jacquard wondered why this process should not be automated.
The fruit of his work was a system using huge solid plates in which several rows of holes were made. These plates were the first punch cards in the world. In fairness, it should be noted that Jacquard was still not an innovator in this area. French inventors, Basil Bouchon and Jacques Vaucanson, also tried to use perforated tapes in their looms, but were unable to complete what was started.
The principle of operation of the Jacquard machine was that punch cards were fed to the entrance to the reader, which was a set of probes connected with thread rods. When the perforated tape passed through the reader, the probes fell through the holes, raising the corresponding threads. So a certain combination of holes in the punch card allowed to obtain the desired pattern on the fabric.
Punched cards also occupied a central place in the inventions of the American engineer Herman Hollerith, who in 1890 created a tabulator - a device designed to process alphanumeric characters written on a punched card and output the result to paper tape. At first, the Hollerith tabulator was used by the US Census Bureau, and a little later, the system was adopted by the railway and the government. By the way, in 1896, Hollerith founded the company Tabulating Machine Company, which in 1911 became part of the CTR conglomerate, which in turn was renamed IBM in 1924.
The main advantage of punch cards was the simplicity and convenience of data manipulation. You could add or remove cards anywhere in the deck, and it’s easy to replace one card with another. But there were also disadvantages, which over time began to outweigh the pros. First of all, it is a small capacity. As a rule, a punch card contained only 80 characters. This means that to store 1 MB of data would require about 10 thousand punch cards. Also punch cards were characterized by low read and write speeds. Even the fastest readers did not process more than a thousand punch cards per minute, which corresponds to approximately 1.6 Kb / min. And, of course, reliability. To damage a punched card made of thin cardboard or to make an extra hole was easy.
The development of punch cards peaked in the middle of the 20th century, and the decline of the era came in the 1980s, when they were replaced by more advanced magnetic storage media.
The first magnetic film was created in 1928 by the German scientist Fritz Pflumer. Such a film was a thin paper on which a thin layer of iron oxide was applied. In the same year, Pflumer showed a device designed for magnetic recording on such a tape. When recording information on the film, it was exposed to a magnetic field, and magnetization was preserved on its surface.
The first commercial computer equipped with magnetic tape was the UNIVAC-I, launched in 1951. Compared to punch cards, the UNIVAC-I magnetic film was much more capacious - about 1 MB of data could fit into it.
Magnetic tapes were used as the main data warehouse until the 1980s. During this period, they were installed in mainframes and mini-computers. With the advent of hard drives, magnetic tape was assigned the role of backup data storage. In the 2000s, opinions were repeatedly expressed that soon magnetic films would finally retire. Since 2008, the tape drive market has declined by an average of 14% per year. However, the situation changed dramatically in 2011, when Thailand, where huge production capacities of hard disk manufacturers were located, was badly damaged by the flood. Due to a natural disaster, HDD production volumes fell significantly, and product prices rose 20-60%. As a result, the magnetic tape has gained a second life.
The tape drive market is further supported by the fact that such storage devices are still cheaper than modern hard drives. According to Evangelos Eleftero, head of data storage technology at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, 1 GB of tape costs about 4 cents, while 1 GB of disk space on a HDD costs at least 2.5 times more - 10 cents. For this reason, the choice in favor of magnetic film is made, for example, by large research laboratories, where there is a need to store huge amounts of information. For example, magnetic tape is used to store the results at the Large Hadron Collider. To store 28 petabytes of data on the hard drives of the CERN organization responsible for the creation and operation of the collider, would have to fork out more than $ 38 million. While storing the same amount of information on magnetic tape cost them only 1.5 million.
According to the head of the CERN data processing and storage division Alberto Pace, in addition to low cost, magnetic tape has several more advantages over hard drives. The first is reliability. In the event of a tape break, it can always be glued together, losing only a few hundred megabytes of data. And if the hard drive crashes, most likely all information will be lost. Secondly, it is access speed. The robot, which selects the desired cartridge and inserts it into the reader, takes about 40 seconds to complete this operation. But even this is about 4 times faster than if the data had to be read from the hard drive. Thirdly, the service life of magnetic tapes reaches 30 years or more, while hard drives can work for only 5 years.
Alberto Pace singled out another significant plus of magnetic tapes - their safety. In theory, attackers can gain access to hard drives, while online access to magnetic tape cannot be obtained.
The next stage in the evolution of storage media was a diskette. She saw the light in 1971, and IBM was involved in its development. The history of creating a floppy disk is quite simple: IBM faced the question of how to send software updates to its customers, and Alan Schugart, an engineer at the company, proposed the idea of a fast and compact floppy disk. The first diskette was executed in an 8-inch form factor and had a capacity of 80 KB. Only one-time recording was supported. Interestingly, the original design of the floppy disk did not provide for the usual plastic casing for all of us - IBM planned to supply the floppy disk without any protection. However, in this form, the floppy disk attracted dust, in addition, it could easily be damaged. Therefore, it was decided to pack the disk in a plastic case.
In fact, the first floppy disks were not at all popular. The reason for this is that the cost of the drives that were required to read the floppy disks nearly exceeded the cost of the whole computer.
Shugart and IBM engineers continued to improve their brainchild. In 1973, the volume of floppy disks was increased to 256 KB, and in 1975 it became 4 times more. But the main task of Shugart was not so much an increase in the volume of the diskette’s memory as a reduction in its size. Initially, the floppy disk was conceived as a handheld device, but an 8-inch device could fit in a midsize travel bag.
And in 1976 a 5.25-inch format appeared. It should be noted that this standard was developed by the Shugart-based company Shugart Associates in close cooperation with the organization Wang Laboratories, which planned to use a reduced format in their desktop computers. Why 5.25 "? When An Wang of Wang Laboratories, together with Jim Adkisson and Don Massaro of Shugart Associates, discussed the future form factor in the bar, they were attracted by the usual napkin. And the idea was born to create a diskette with such dimensions. It was called mini-floppy.
The familiar 3.5-inch format floppy disk received in 1981. The creator of the format was Sony. The first 3.5 "floppy disks had a capacity of 720 KB, but soon there appeared models containing 1.44 MB of information. But by the mid-90s even this volume was not enough. Nevertheless, floppy disks were held on the media market for a long time, and only with the advent of affordable flash drives did they begin to lose ground.
Despite all the advantages of “flash drives” over floppy disks, some manufacturers have attempted to save the outdated standard. So, Iomega developed a floppy disk called Iomega Zip, which differed about classic floppy disks with an increased memory capacity of up to 100 MB and a higher read and write speed. But due to the high cost and reliability issues, the Iomega Zip was never able to squeeze out 3.5 "floppy disks or flash drives on the market.
(To be continued ...)
Our story begins, of course, with punch cards. Many people mistakenly believe that punch cards are the discovery of the 20th century, however, this is not so. The first punch cards appeared at the beginning of the XIX century and were used in a loom created by the French inventor Joseph Marie Jacquard.
So, what did Jacquard invent. In the 19th century, fabric production was a rather labor-intensive process, but at its core it was a constant repetition of the same actions. Having a huge background of experience as a machine adjuster, Jacquard wondered why this process should not be automated.
The fruit of his work was a system using huge solid plates in which several rows of holes were made. These plates were the first punch cards in the world. In fairness, it should be noted that Jacquard was still not an innovator in this area. French inventors, Basil Bouchon and Jacques Vaucanson, also tried to use perforated tapes in their looms, but were unable to complete what was started.
The principle of operation of the Jacquard machine was that punch cards were fed to the entrance to the reader, which was a set of probes connected with thread rods. When the perforated tape passed through the reader, the probes fell through the holes, raising the corresponding threads. So a certain combination of holes in the punch card allowed to obtain the desired pattern on the fabric.
Punched cards also occupied a central place in the inventions of the American engineer Herman Hollerith, who in 1890 created a tabulator - a device designed to process alphanumeric characters written on a punched card and output the result to paper tape. At first, the Hollerith tabulator was used by the US Census Bureau, and a little later, the system was adopted by the railway and the government. By the way, in 1896, Hollerith founded the company Tabulating Machine Company, which in 1911 became part of the CTR conglomerate, which in turn was renamed IBM in 1924.
The main advantage of punch cards was the simplicity and convenience of data manipulation. You could add or remove cards anywhere in the deck, and it’s easy to replace one card with another. But there were also disadvantages, which over time began to outweigh the pros. First of all, it is a small capacity. As a rule, a punch card contained only 80 characters. This means that to store 1 MB of data would require about 10 thousand punch cards. Also punch cards were characterized by low read and write speeds. Even the fastest readers did not process more than a thousand punch cards per minute, which corresponds to approximately 1.6 Kb / min. And, of course, reliability. To damage a punched card made of thin cardboard or to make an extra hole was easy.
The development of punch cards peaked in the middle of the 20th century, and the decline of the era came in the 1980s, when they were replaced by more advanced magnetic storage media.
The first magnetic film was created in 1928 by the German scientist Fritz Pflumer. Such a film was a thin paper on which a thin layer of iron oxide was applied. In the same year, Pflumer showed a device designed for magnetic recording on such a tape. When recording information on the film, it was exposed to a magnetic field, and magnetization was preserved on its surface.
The first commercial computer equipped with magnetic tape was the UNIVAC-I, launched in 1951. Compared to punch cards, the UNIVAC-I magnetic film was much more capacious - about 1 MB of data could fit into it.
According to the head of the CERN data processing and storage division Alberto Pace, in addition to low cost, magnetic tape has several more advantages over hard drives. The first is reliability. In the event of a tape break, it can always be glued together, losing only a few hundred megabytes of data. And if the hard drive crashes, most likely all information will be lost. Secondly, it is access speed. The robot, which selects the desired cartridge and inserts it into the reader, takes about 40 seconds to complete this operation. But even this is about 4 times faster than if the data had to be read from the hard drive. Thirdly, the service life of magnetic tapes reaches 30 years or more, while hard drives can work for only 5 years.
Alberto Pace singled out another significant plus of magnetic tapes - their safety. In theory, attackers can gain access to hard drives, while online access to magnetic tape cannot be obtained.
The next stage in the evolution of storage media was a diskette. She saw the light in 1971, and IBM was involved in its development. The history of creating a floppy disk is quite simple: IBM faced the question of how to send software updates to its customers, and Alan Schugart, an engineer at the company, proposed the idea of a fast and compact floppy disk. The first diskette was executed in an 8-inch form factor and had a capacity of 80 KB. Only one-time recording was supported. Interestingly, the original design of the floppy disk did not provide for the usual plastic casing for all of us - IBM planned to supply the floppy disk without any protection. However, in this form, the floppy disk attracted dust, in addition, it could easily be damaged. Therefore, it was decided to pack the disk in a plastic case.
In fact, the first floppy disks were not at all popular. The reason for this is that the cost of the drives that were required to read the floppy disks nearly exceeded the cost of the whole computer.
Shugart and IBM engineers continued to improve their brainchild. In 1973, the volume of floppy disks was increased to 256 KB, and in 1975 it became 4 times more. But the main task of Shugart was not so much an increase in the volume of the diskette’s memory as a reduction in its size. Initially, the floppy disk was conceived as a handheld device, but an 8-inch device could fit in a midsize travel bag.
And in 1976 a 5.25-inch format appeared. It should be noted that this standard was developed by the Shugart-based company Shugart Associates in close cooperation with the organization Wang Laboratories, which planned to use a reduced format in their desktop computers. Why 5.25 "? When An Wang of Wang Laboratories, together with Jim Adkisson and Don Massaro of Shugart Associates, discussed the future form factor in the bar, they were attracted by the usual napkin. And the idea was born to create a diskette with such dimensions. It was called mini-floppy.
The familiar 3.5-inch format floppy disk received in 1981. The creator of the format was Sony. The first 3.5 "floppy disks had a capacity of 720 KB, but soon there appeared models containing 1.44 MB of information. But by the mid-90s even this volume was not enough. Nevertheless, floppy disks were held on the media market for a long time, and only with the advent of affordable flash drives did they begin to lose ground.
Despite all the advantages of “flash drives” over floppy disks, some manufacturers have attempted to save the outdated standard. So, Iomega developed a floppy disk called Iomega Zip, which differed about classic floppy disks with an increased memory capacity of up to 100 MB and a higher read and write speed. But due to the high cost and reliability issues, the Iomega Zip was never able to squeeze out 3.5 "floppy disks or flash drives on the market.
(To be continued ...)