Summary of a lesson in computer science on the topic: "History of the development of information carriers." Interesting facts from the history of computer science (15 photos) Facts from the history of storage media

A flash drive is an amazing little thing that stores the whole world.

What is a flash drive? These are high capacity, compact dimensions, high speed of reading and writing information, protection from mechanical and electromagnetic influences and high competition to all other information carriers. Everyone knows this. Let's get acquainted with those facts about flash drives that few people know about.

1. The first flash drives were created in the early seventies.

2. Temperature for storing modern flash memory cards from -30 to +80 degrees.

3. The creativity of the flash drives produced shakes the minds and aesthetic feelings of citizens. The world's most expensive USB flash drive was made by the Swiss jewelry company La Maison Shawish. It is compatible with any operating system and holds 32 GB of memory. The flash drive is made in the shape of a mushroom. There are several options for decorating it with precious stones: emeralds, rubies, diamonds and sapphires in combination with pink or yellow gold, which, of course, affects its cost. The creator of the company, Mohamed Shawish, who is also the author of the flash drive decoration, asks about $37,000 for his delicacy!

4. If you use temperature storage conditions correctly, the flash drive can serve its owner for 10 years.

5. The capacity of a flash drive decreases depending on the amount of rewriting of various information.

6. Disposable flash drives appeared. A flash drive, like a mobile phone, should always be carried with you. But it is very small and often gets lost, so the best minds of humanity came up with the GIGS.2.GO device, the size of a 1 GB plastic card with a body made of recycled cardboard. Four disposable flash drives are attached to the case. Its price is low. In the future, such flash drives will replace information materials, which are often handed out on the street and thus save tons of paper.

7. For the manufacturer, a floppy disk with a capacity of 1 GB costs $1, and flash memory with the same capacity costs $0.7.

8. A flash drive stored in the refrigerator has a longer shelf life of information.

9. The world's first flash drive with a capacity of 1 terabyte appeared. It was presented by Kingston at CES 2013. The read speed of such a flash drive is 240 MB/s, and the write speed is 160 MB/s. The dimensions of this block are 7.2 x 2.7 x 2.1 cm. This flash drive will be produced in two volumes - 1TB and 512GB. It is still unknown how much the first one will cost, but the cost of the second one has already been announced - $1,750.

10. The original flash card is designed for 10 thousand rewrites, while the fake one can withstand about a thousand complete rewrites.

I’m sitting, formatting flash drives, and my mother is watering the flowers next to me. And I can’t find the cap, then I say out loud: “If I were the cap of a flash drive, then where would I be?” To which my mother answered: “In a mental hospital!” – user Next jokes on one of the forums.

Friends! Don’t lose flash drives - after all, our whole life is in them!

Information carriers of the past. March 31st, 2014

Bronze and DVD, what can they have in common?

People don’t want to accept the fact that there were civilizations here before them with quite advanced technologies. Most people admit that they existed, but almost no one considers the fact that there is a lot left of them.
On one forum that I respect, a topic was once raised, the meaning of which boiled down to the fact that they were trying to discuss the issue of storing information. In the sense that it (information) is stored for a long time and does not deteriorate. After all, paper smolders, sharpening stone pages with a chisel takes a long time and requires too much labor. Electronic media, too, will sooner or later turn into dust.
But since we have heard about other developed civilizations, why does no one admit that they had successfully resolved this issue at that time? And that all you have to do is want to look for these solutions. Look for those flash drives and disks that are scattered in abundance here and there. Try reading them already.
Look at those same bronze Chinese mirrors. And there is a great deal of this “vinyl” out there. But things didn’t go any further than letting bunnies in.
Or this information carrier, from here:

The Inexplicable: An ancient “genetic disk” explains in pictures the phases of the origin of life

Here is the most important and most incredible artifact that was found in Colombia. This is the so-called "Genetic disk". It is made of Lydite, a very strong stone. In terms of strength, it is not inferior to granite, but the structure of the stone is layered, so it is impossible to make such a disk from such material these days. Diameter - 27 cm.

On this disc there are several images of those processes that in ordinary life can only be viewed under a microscope. On the left side of the disc at 11 o'clock, you can see an image of a man's testicle without sperm and with sperm, apparently the process of sperm generation is shown here.

On the left, approximately in the hour direction, you can see several already born spermatozoa. The image is still incomprehensible to us. A more detailed study by biologists is needed.

In this fragment of the "Genetic Disk" the images look like in real life, for comparison, a photograph taken by the researchers is presented.

On the back of the disk at the top there is an embryo in several stages of development. and ending with what a newborn baby looks like.

We also see on the disk at six o'clock the image of a man and a woman.

Around three o'clock on the disk you can see images of a man, a woman and a child, the strange thing here is the way the human head is depicted. If this is not a stylistic image, then what species do these people belong to?

(Based on an interview with Klaus Dona, who organized the Avalon project.
Ludite - this stone is as hard as granite, but its structure is such that it is very fragile. The “genetic disk” shows the phases of the birth and development of the fetus, including a graphic image of sperm and a fertilized egg. As is known, for the first time 25 years ago in Sweden it was possible take a photo of what such cells look like inside a woman, using high-tech devices and a microscope. I think that just a few thousand years ago such knowledge was not available. In the same collection - skillfully made devices, presumably for medical purposes. In Vienna, we analyzed the material from which. These artifacts are made. This material, black in color, reminiscent of metal, is undoubtedly Ludite. The most experienced specialist in working with precious stones in Vienna, after many hours of examination, told us that he has no idea how these objects were made. , by whom and when. Nowadays, with the same materials, it is impossible to do such work.
In Colombia, the archeology committee refused to recognize these objects as being of historical value.
Due to the specific nature of his work, Klaus Donaus managed to put together more than 400 items that cannot be explained in any way on the basis of the modern Social Contract.

As the curator of the Art Exhibition of the House of Habsburg, Austria, he was initially skeptical about “artifacts”, having encountered with his own eyes hundreds of real objects that did not fit into the temporal history of mankind, he went further.
And I became convinced that in reality modern science, the entire system of society is designed to hide information, facts, objects - which are in no way possible to understand or do... even in our “technically developed” society.
It is a rare example when a person independently begins to explore, rather than reject, and changes his belief system in the process of independent search and comprehension).

There are also such artifacts.

Let's look at some interesting facts from the history of computer science. What do we know about this science? Only that modern society simply cannot do without it? The fact that the existence of computer games, the Internet, online communication, calls to the other end of the hemisphere would be impossible without the advent of computer science.

For the first time in 1957, computer science was the name given to the technical field that carried out automated processing information using a computer.
It was on December 4, 1948 (Informatics Day) that the “electronic Calculating machine", created by Rameev.
September 13 (programmer's day) is the 256th day of the calendar. This number is the maximum power of two and can be expressed in terms of an eight-bit byte. But in a leap year, the celebration falls on September 12th.
The M-1 computer was created in 6 months, and became the first machine in which all logical circuits were created on semiconductors. 256 words – that’s how much memory she had. 15-20 operations with 23-bit numbers per second.
M-1 is not the first computer; before it, a small electronic calculating machine was created by the team of Sergei Lebedev. It occupied several tens of square meters and was able to carry out about three thousand operations per second. There were huge queues for this computer, because everyone wanted to make their calculations easier.
The microprocessor weighs only 2 grams, but its production requires 1.6 kg of fossil fuels, 72 grams. chemicals, 32 liters of water.
In the 70s, physicist James Russell invented the compact disc only because he didn't like the sound of Mozart when the needle scratched the record. Subsequently, his invention was patented by Philips, appropriating the rights to itself.
In English, “bug” is a bug, a computer error, but it got its name thanks to a team of research institute employees. An ordinary situation: the computer broke down, they spent several weeks looking for the cause. In the end, it turned out that the moth closed the contacts with its wings, and since then the “bug” has had this name.
36 thousand transactions - this is the calculation of the specialized computer base of the New York Bank, which carries out transactions with securities. 1985, the height of trading, and then the program’s memory ended. Due to a failure in the system, the bank found itself in huge debt, approximately $32 billion in debt. To eliminate the error, the bank had to borrow $24 billion, while leaving all its existing assets as collateral.
9
The winner of the great grandmaster Garry Kasparov is a computer. In 1994, it was a computer game that was able to beat the great chess player.
The World Wide Web was created in the 60s of the last century by American developers for the defense forces of the state.
Facebook is the most popular social network in the world, the monthly turnover of photographs is 3 billion. If FB were a country, it would round out the top three in terms of population.
The word "spam" where it came from? Back in 1936, an American organization released new canned food called SPiced hAM. Due to the Second World War, sales were stopped, but after it it was necessary to sell expired goods. A large-scale advertising campaign, which became the standard of importunity. And 50 years later, a certain Dave Rhodes sent a bunch of identical SMS messages, advertising a new financial pyramid. Since then, “spam” has been an annoying mailing.
The most destructive virus in the history of computer science - “I Love You” or LoveLetter. The letter was sent to unsuspecting people; upon opening it, it infected all computer data, creating its own copy to forward to all contacts. It caused $15 billion in damage, affecting over 3 million computers.
The very first and largest virus attack was called the "Morris worm". Not only were about 6 thousand infected computer systems, but also the NASA research center itself, causing damage of $96 million.

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According to archaeologists, the desire to record information appeared in humans approximately forty thousand years ago. The very first carrier was rock.

This stationary data storage had a lot of advantages (reliability, resistance to damage, large capacity, high reading speed) and one disadvantage (labor-intensive and slow writing). Therefore, over time, more and more advanced storage media began to appear.

Perforated paper tape

Most early computers used paper tape wound on reels. Information was stored on it in the form of holes.

Some machines, such as the Colossus Mark 1 (1944), worked with data entered via real-time tape. Later computers, such as the Manchester Mark 1 (1949), read programs from tape and loaded them into a primitive form of electronic memory for subsequent execution. Punched tape has been used to write and read data for thirty years.

Punch cards

In the 1950s, IBM was already making full use of punched cards in its computers for storing and entering data, and soon other manufacturers began to use this medium. At that time, 80-column cards were common, in which a separate column was allocated for one symbol. Some may be surprised, but in 2002 IBM was still developing punch card technology. True, in the 21st century the company was interested in cards the size of a postage stamp, capable of storing up to 25 million pages of information. Magnetic tape

The first removable disks

In 1963, IBM introduced the first hard drive with removable disk– IBM 1311. It was a set of interchangeable disks. Each set consisted of six disks with a diameter of 14 inches, holding up to 2 MB of information. In the 1970s, many hard drives, such as the DEC RK05, supported such disk sets, and they were especially often used by minicomputer manufacturers to sell software.

Tape cartridges

They became most widespread in the 1970s and 1980s. Like reels, cartridges proved to be very flexible media: if there was a lot of information to be recorded, more tape simply fit into the cartridge.

Today, tape cartridges like the 800GB LTO Ultrium are used for large-scale server support, although their popularity has fallen in recent years due to the greater convenience of transferring data from hard drive to hard drive.

Printing on paper In the 1970s, due to its relatively low cost, they gained popularity. personal computers
. However, the existing methods of storing data were unaffordable for many. One of the first PCs, MITS Altair, was supplied without storage media at all. Users were asked to enter programs using special toggle switches on the front panel. Then, at the dawn of the development of personal computers, users often had to literally insert sheets of paper into the computer

handwritten programs. Later, the programs began to be distributed in printed form through paper magazines.

Floppy disks

In the late 60s, the American company IBM proposed a new storage device that used a floppy disk. A flexible disk works in the same way as a hard disk, but is made in the form of an elastic round plate with a plastic base coated with a magnetic composition. The disc is placed in a special flexible cassette sleeve that protects it from mechanical damage

and dust.

The disk with the envelope is installed by the user into a special device (disk drive). In this device, it rotates inside the envelope at a speed of about 300 rpm.

To reduce friction, the inside of the envelope is coated with a special material. Through specially made slots, the magnetic read-write head of the drive contacts the surface of the disk and reads or writes the corresponding information. A floppy magnetic disk drive (FMD) is a complex mechanical device; it requires connection to a computer of a special electronic controller unit, which converts commands coming from the machine to the drive, monitors their execution, and also manages the data exchange process.

IBM proposed the use of floppy disks with a diameter of 203 mm (8 English inches) and developed a corresponding standard for these disk drives. In 1976, about 200 thousand devices were sold, in 1981 already 3-4 million, for a total amount of 2.3 billion dollars, and in 1984 8.2 million were delivered. Floppy disk drive In 1976, about 200 thousand devices were sold, in 1981 already 3-4 million, for a total amount of 2.3 billion dollars, and in 1984 8.2 million were delivered. NGMD

in the amount of 4.2 billion dollars. Only in the USA in 1984 for 285 million floppy disks were manufactured. Along with the rapid development In 1976, about 200 thousand devices were sold, in 1981 already 3-4 million, for a total amount of 2.3 billion dollars, and in 1984 8.2 million were delivered. computer technology

improved and

. In the early 70s, American inventor Allen Shugart proposed reducing the diameter of the discs to 133 mm (5.25 inches). In 1976, the company he formed, Shugart Associates, released the first drives with floppy disks of this size, called minidisks (minifloppy). Despite the initially smaller amount of external memory, these drives were half the price of standard 203mm drives. The latter circumstance immediately attracted the attention of a wide group of PC users. devices were developed and began to be supplied in which information was written and read from both sides of the disk. This increased the memory capacity by 2 times, and taking into account the double recording density - by 4 times.

Development and production In 1976, about 200 thousand devices were sold, in 1981 already 3-4 million, for a total amount of 2.3 billion dollars, and in 1984 8.2 million were delivered. There were several dozen companies in the USA, Japan, Germany and other countries. These devices quickly replaced tape drives in many PC applications. Usage In 1976, about 200 thousand devices were sold, in 1981 already 3-4 million, for a total amount of 2.3 billion dollars, and in 1984 8.2 million were delivered. increased system performance by an order of magnitude.

Currently external memory on floppy disks has become an integral part typical configuration most educational and all professional PCs.

In what directions did further technical development take place? In 1976, about 200 thousand devices were sold, in 1981 already 3-4 million, for a total amount of 2.3 billion dollars, and in 1984 8.2 million were delivered. ?

Firstly, the physical dimensions of storage devices continued to decrease, in particular in height. Many companies produced half-height drives, i.e. two devices could be placed in the previous case.

Secondly, successful attempts were made to reduce the diameter of the disks, and therefore the dimensions of the drive. Thus, the Japanese company Sony developed In 1976, about 200 thousand devices were sold, in 1981 already 3-4 million, for a total amount of 2.3 billion dollars, and in 1984 8.2 million were delivered. with discs with a diameter of 89 mm (3.5 inches). The disc is placed in a hard sleeve measuring 90x94 mm (3.54x3.7 inches) and 1.3 mm thick, equipped with a special metal “curtain”. When a disk is inserted into the drive, the “shutter” automatically slides open to reveal a slot in the envelope through which the magnetic head interacts with the floppy disk.

With double recording density, such a disc with single-sided recording holds 360 KB, and with double-sided recording - 720 KB. In 1976, about 200 thousand devices were sold, in 1981 already 3-4 million, for a total amount of 2.3 billion dollars, and in 1984 8.2 million were delivered. A standard Sony drive cost about 10% more than a drive on 133 mm disks, and 89 mm disks themselves were 2-2.5 times more expensive than similar 133 mm disks. However, the small size of the disks and the drive itself, the rigid design of the envelope with the disk and the protection of the disk surface using a “shutter” attracted people to this type. In 1976, about 200 thousand devices were sold, in 1981 already 3-4 million, for a total amount of 2.3 billion dollars, and in 1984 8.2 million were delivered. a significant number of users. Drives with 89 mm disks with a capacity of 720 KB have found use in many portable PCs, for example, in models of the Japanese company Toshiba - T1100, T1200, T3100, American companies Zenith Data Systems - Z181, Bondwell Inc. - Bondwell 8 and etc. IBM uses in PS/2 series PC models

with disks with a diameter of 89 mm, a capacity of 720 KB and 1.44 MB. Thirdly, through the use of new technical means In 1976, about 200 thousand devices were sold, in 1981 already 3-4 million, for a total amount of 2.3 billion dollars, and in 1984 8.2 million were delivered. and technologies a number of companies developed

Thus, IBM in PC AT used drives on 133 mm disks with a capacity of 1.2 MB of formatted memory. By moving to a higher density of tracks on the disk, it was possible to more than double the capacity of the PC's external drive.

The Japanese company Hitachi-Maxwell announced the development of 133 mm flexible magnetic disks with a memory capacity of 19 MB per disk. In a short period of time, the capacity of 89 mm disks increased from 360 KB to 1.44 MB.

By the beginning of 1987, 133 mm disks for PCs from IBM were the most common in the world, and drives on disks with a diameter of 203 mm had practically ceased to be produced. The 89mm market is growing very quickly In 1976, about 200 thousand devices were sold, in 1981 already 3-4 million, for a total amount of 2.3 billion dollars, and in 1984 8.2 million were delivered..

According to estimates from Dataquest (USA), the production of 133 mm drives grew from 8.2 million units in 1985 to 11 million units in 1987, and then fell by 1991 to 7.3 million units . At the same time, the production of 89 mm drives increased from 603 thousand units in 1985 to 14 million units in 1991, i.e. by the end of the 80s it exceeded the production of 133 mm drives.

The cost of a standard drive for the IBM PC with 133 mm disks with a capacity of 360 KB was $65 in the USA in mid-1987, and with 89 mm disks with a capacity of 720 KB - $150.

Compact cassettes

The compact cassette was invented by Philips, which had the idea to place two small reels of magnetic film in a plastic case.

It was in this format that audio recordings were made in the 1960s. HP used such cassettes in its HP 9830 desktop (1972), but at first such cassettes were not particularly popular as digital information storage media. Then, seekers of inexpensive storage media nevertheless turned their gaze towards cassettes, which, thanks to their light hand, remained in demand until the early 1980s. By the way, data on them could be loaded from a regular audio player.

Since the introduction of the first magnetic storage device (IBM RAMAC), the growth of surface recording density has reached 25 percent per year, and since the early 1990s - 60 percent. The development and introduction of magnetoresistive (1991) and giant magnetoresistive (1997) heads further accelerated the increase in surface recording density. In the 45 years since the first magnetic data storage devices appeared, the surface recording density has increased by more than 5 million times.

In modern 3.5-inch drives, the value of this parameter is 10-20 Gbit/inch 2 , and in experimental models it reaches 40 Gbit/inch 2 . This allows the production of drives with a capacity of more than 400 GB.

A ROM cartridge is a card consisting of a read-only memory (ROM) and a connector enclosed in a hard shell. Field of application of cartridges – computer games and programs. Thus, in 1976, Fairchild released a ROM cartridge for recording software for the Fairchild Channel F video console. Soon, home computers such as the Atari 800 (1979) or TI-99/4 (1979) were also adapted to use ROM cartridges.

ROM cartridges were easy to use, but relatively expensive, which is why they “died.”

The Great Floppy Disk Experiments

In the 1980s, many companies tried to create an alternative to the 3.5-inch floppy disk. One such invention (pictured above in the center) can hardly be called a floppy disk even at a stretch: the ZX Microdrive cartridge consisted of a huge roll of magnetic tape, similar to an eight-track cassette. Another experimenter, Apple, created the FileWare floppy disk (right) that came with the first Apple computer Lisa - the worst device in the company's history according to Network World, as well as a 3-inch Compact Disk (bottom left) and a now rare 2-inch floppy disk

LT-1 (top left), used exclusively in the 1989 Zenith Minisport laptop. Other experiments resulted in products that became niche and failed to replicate the success of their 5.25-inch and 3.5-inch predecessors.

Optical disc

This is how the world learned about CD-ROMs in 1985.

Over the next 25 years, the optical disc has undergone a lot of changes, its evolutionary chain including DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-ray.

A significant milestone was the introduction of CD-Recordable (CD-R) in 1988, which allowed users to burn data to disc themselves.

Like compact discs, magneto-optical discs are “read” by a laser. However, unlike conventional CDs and CD-Rs, most magneto-optical media allow data to be written and erased repeatedly. This is achieved through the interaction of a magnetic process and a laser when recording data. The first magneto-optical disk was included with the NeXT computer (1988, photo below right), and its capacity was 256 MB. The most famous media of this type is the Sony MiniDisc audio disc (top center, 1992). It also had a “brother” for storing digital data, which was called MD-DATA (top left). Magneto-optical disks are still produced, but due to their low capacity and relatively high cost, they have become niche products.

Iomega and Zip Drive

Iomega made its presence felt in the storage media market in the 1980s with the release of cartridges with magnetic disks Bernoulli Box, with a capacity of 10 to 20 MB.

A later interpretation of this technology was embodied in the so-called Zip media (1994), which could hold up to 100 MB of information on an inexpensive 3.5-inch disk. The format was popular due to its affordable price and good capacity, and Zip disks remained at the crest of popularity until the end of the 1990s. However, CD-Rs that had already appeared at that time could record up to 650 MB, and when their price dropped to a few cents apiece, sales of Zip disks fell catastrophically. Iomega made an attempt to save the technology and developed disks of 250 and 750 MB in size, but by that time CD-Rs had already completely conquered the market. And so Zip became history.

Floppy-disks

The first super floppy disk was released by Insight Peripherals in 1992. The 3.5-inch disk held 21 MB of information. Unlike other media, this format was compatible with earlier traditional 3.5-inch floppy drives. The secret to the high efficiency of such drives lay in the combination of a floppy disk and optics, that is, data was recorded in a magnetic environment using a laser head, which provided more accurate recording and more tracks, respectively, more space. In the late 1990s, two new formats appeared - Imation LS-120 SuperDisk (120 MB, bottom right) and Sony HiFD (150 MB, top right). The new products became serious competitors to the Iomega Zip drive, but in the end, the CD-R format won over everyone.

A mess in the world of portable media

The resounding success of the Zip Drive in the mid-1990s spawned a host of similar devices, whose manufacturers hoped to grab a piece of the market from Zip. Iomega's main competitors include SyQuest, which first fragmented its own market segment and then ruined its product line with excessive variety - SyJet, SparQ, EZFlyer and EZ135. Another serious, but “murky” rival is Castlewood Orb, which came up with a Zip-like disk with a capacity of 2.2 GB.

Finally, Iomega itself has made an attempt to supplement the Zip drive with other types removable media– from large removable hard drives (1- and 2-GB Jaz Drive) to miniature 40 MB Clik drive. But none reached the heights of Zip.

Flash is coming

Toshiba invented NAND flash memory in the early 1980s, but the technology only became popular a decade later, following the advent of digital cameras and PDAs. At this time, it began to be sold in various forms - from large credit cards (intended for use in early handhelds) to CompactFlash, SmartMedia, Secure Digital, Memory Stick and xD Picture Cards.

Flash memory cards are convenient, first of all, because they have no moving parts. In addition, they are economical, durable and relatively inexpensive with ever-increasing memory capacity. The first CF cards held 2 MB, but now their capacity reaches 128 GB.

Much less

The IBM/Hitachi promotional slide shows a tiny Microdrive hard drive. It appeared in 2003 and for some time won the hearts of computer users.

The iPod and other media players, which debuted in 2001, are equipped with similar devices based on a rotating disk, but manufacturers quickly became disillusioned with such a drive: it was too fragile, energy-intensive and small in volume. So this format is almost “buried”.

1956 - HDD IBM 350 as part of the first production IBM 305 RAMAC computer. The drive occupied a box the size of a large refrigerator and weighed 971 kg, and the total memory capacity of 50 thin disks covered with pure iron with a diameter of 610 mm rotating in it was about 5 million 6-bit bytes (3.5 MB in terms of 8-bit bytes) .

Here's the thing about hard drives.
* 1980 - the first 5.25-inch Winchester, Shugart ST-506, 5 MB.
* 1981 - 5.25-inch Shugart ST-412, 10 MB.
* 1986 - SCSI, ATA (IDE) standards.
* 1991 - maximum capacity 100 MB.
* 1995 - maximum capacity 2 GB.
* 1997 - maximum capacity 10 GB.
* 1998 - UDMA/33 and ATAPI standards.
* 1999 - IBM releases Microdrive with a capacity of 170 and 340 MB.
* 2002 - ATA/ATAPI-6 standard and drives with a capacity of over 137 GB.
* 2003 - the appearance of SATA.
* 2005 - maximum capacity 500 GB.
* 2005 - Serial ATA 3G (or SATA II) standard.
* 2005 - the appearance of SAS (Serial Attached SCSI).
* 2006 - application of the perpendicular recording method in commercial drives.
* 2006 - the appearance of the first “hybrid” hard drives containing a flash memory block.
* 2007 - Hitachi introduces the first commercial drive with a capacity of 1 TB.
* 2009 - based on 500 GB platters from Western Digital, then Seagate Technology LLC released models with a capacity of 2 TB.
* 2009 - Western Digital announced the creation of 2.5-inch HDDs with a capacity of 1 TB (recording density - 333 GB on one plate)
* 2009 - the emergence of the SATA 3.0 standard (SATA 6G).

The Coming of USB

In 1998, the USB era began. The undeniable convenience of USB devices has made them an almost integral part of the lives of all PC users.

Over the years, they decrease in physical size, but become more capacious and cheaper. Especially popular were “flash drives”, or USB thumb drives, which appeared in 2000 (from the English thumb - “thumb”), so named for their size - about the size of a human finger. Thanks to their large capacity and small size, USB drives have become perhaps the best storage media invented by mankind.

Transition to virtuality Over the past fifteen years local networks and the Internet are gradually replacing portable storage media from the lives of PC users. Since today almost any computer has access to the global network, users rarely need to transfer data to external devices or copy it to another computer. Nowadays, wires and electronic signals are responsible for the transfer of information.

To understand how much a person has advanced in terms of information and, thanks to this, evolved, it is enough to remember paper. Can you imagine a civilization without paper and books? Clay tablets, rolls of papyrus, wooden pages... Agree, it’s not very convenient to study when the textbook weighs a couple of centners and is the size of a living room? It would be a complete epic fail of humanity. We wouldn’t be surfing the Internet now, but would be saving money for the third book in our lives. And the beginning of the electronic information revolution, in the epicenter of which we are now, would never have taken place. After all, it all started with paper...

Paper tape, perforated. Start.

The era of computers began much earlier than most hamsters think. Of course, it didn't have a microprocessor, a video card for Contra Strike, or a webcam for chatting on Skype. In the usual understanding of a computer today, these were not computers at all, but huge slow-thinking monsters that performed a negligible number of calculations using good old paper. Or rather, paper linen wound on reels. The information on it was stored in the form of neat holes. Early machines like the Colossus Mark I (1944) worked with data manually. The paper perforated tapes were fed as paper into the printer in real time. However, later monster computers were able to read programs from tape, for example, Manchester Mark I (1949), read code from tape and loaded it into a primitive kind of electronic memory. Punched tape has been used to record and read data for over thirty years. This was the beginning of a new era - the information flowering of humanity.

Most early computers used paper tape wound on reels. Information was stored on it in the form of holes.

The history of punch cards goes back to the very beginning of the 19th century, when they were used to control looms. In 1890, Herman Hollerith used a punched card to process U.S. census data. It was he who found a company (the future IBM) that used such cards in its calculating machines. In the 1950s, IBM was already making full use of punched cards in its computers for storing and entering data, and soon other manufacturers began to use this medium. At that time, 80-column cards were common, in which a separate column was allocated for one symbol. Some may be surprised, but in 2002 IBM was still developing punch card technology. True, in the 21st century the company was interested in cards the size of a postage stamp, capable of storing up to 25 million pages of information.

Magnetic tape

With the release of the first American commercial computer, UNIVAC I (1951), the era of magnetic film began in the IT industry. The pioneer, as usual, was IBM again, and then others followed suit. Magnetic tape was wound openly onto reels and consisted of a very thin strip of plastic coated with a magnetically sensitive substance. The machines recorded and read data using special magnetic heads built into the reel drive. Magnetic tape was widely used in many computer models (especially mainframes and minicomputers) until the 1980s, when tape cartridges were invented.

The first removable disks

In 1963, IBM introduced the first hard drive with a removable disk - the IBM 1311. It was a set of interchangeable disks. Each set consisted of six disks with a diameter of 14 inches, holding up to 2 MB of information. In the 1970s, many hard drives, such as the DEC RK05, supported such disk sets, and they were especially used by minicomputer manufacturers to sell software.

Tape cartridges

In the 1960s, computer hardware manufacturers learned to put rolls of magnetic tape into miniature plastic cartridges. They differed from their predecessors, the reels, in their long life, portability and convenience. They became most widespread in the 1970s and 1980s. Like reels, cartridges proved to be very flexible media: if there was a lot of information to be recorded, more tape simply fit into the cartridge. Today, tape cartridges like the 800GB LTO Ultrium are used for large-scale server support, although their popularity has fallen in recent years due to the greater convenience of transferring data from hard drive to hard drive.

Printing on paper

In the 1970s, personal computers gained popularity due to their relatively low cost. However, the existing methods of storing data were unaffordable for many. One of the first PCs, MITS Altair, was supplied without storage media at all. Users were asked to enter programs using special toggle switches on the front panel. Then, at the dawn of the development of “personal computers,” users often had to literally insert sheets of paper with handwritten programs into the computer. Later, the programs began to be distributed in printed form through paper magazines.

handwritten programs. Later, the programs began to be distributed in printed form through paper magazines.

In 1971, the first IBM floppy disk was released. It was an 8-inch flexible disk coated with a magnetic substance, placed in a plastic case. Users quickly realized that for loading data into a computer, “floppy disks” were faster, cheaper, and more compact than stacks of punched cards. In 1976, one of the creators of the first floppy disk, Alan Shugart, proposed its new format - 5.25 inches. It existed in this size until the late 1980s, until Sony's 3.5-inch floppy disks appeared.

Compact cassettes

The compact cassette was invented by Philips, which had the idea to place two small reels of magnetic film in a plastic case. It was in this format that audio recordings were made in the 1960s. HP used such cassettes in its HP 9830 desktop (1972), but at first such cassettes were not particularly popular as digital information storage media. Then, seekers of inexpensive storage media nevertheless turned their gaze towards cassettes, which, thanks to their light hand, remained in demand until the early 1980s. By the way, data on them could be loaded from a regular audio player.

A ROM cartridge is a card consisting of a read-only memory (ROM) and a connector enclosed in a hard shell. The area of application of cartridges is computer games and programs. Thus, in 1976, Fairchild released a ROM cartridge for recording software for the Fairchild Channel F video console. Soon, home computers such as the Atari 800 (1979) or TI-99/4 (1979) were also adapted to use ROM cartridges. ROM cartridges were easy to use, but relatively expensive, which is why they “died.”

The Great Floppy Disk Experiments

In the 1980s, many companies tried to create an alternative to the 3.5-inch floppy disk. One such invention (pictured above in the center) can hardly be called a floppy disk even at a stretch: the ZX Microdrive cartridge consisted of a huge roll of magnetic tape, similar to an eight-track cassette. Another experimenter, Apple, created the FileWare floppy disk (right), which shipped with the first Apple Lisa computer, the worst device in the company's history according to Network World, as well as the 3-inch Compact Disk (bottom left) and the now rare 2-inch LT floppy disk -1 (top left), used exclusively in the 1989 Zenith Minisport laptop. Other experiments resulted in products that became niche and failed to replicate the success of their 5.25-inch and 3.5-inch predecessors.

Optical disc

The CD, originally used as a digital audio storage medium, owes its birth to a joint project between Sony and Philips and first appeared on the market in 1982. Digital data is stored on this plastic medium in the form of micro-grooves on its mirror surface, and the information is read using a laser head. It turned out that digital CDs are the best suited for storing computer data, and soon the same Sony and Philips finalized the new product. This is how the world learned about CD-ROMs in 1985. Over the next 25 years, the optical disc has undergone a lot of changes, its evolutionary chain includes DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-ray. A significant milestone was the introduction of CD-Recordable (CD-R) in 1988, which allowed users to burn data to disc themselves. In the late 1990s, optical disks finally became cheaper, finally relegating floppy disks to the background.

A significant milestone was the introduction of CD-Recordable (CD-R) in 1988, which allowed users to burn data to disc themselves.

Iomega and Zip Drive

Iomega made its presence felt in the storage media market in the 1980s with the release of Bernoulli Box magnetic disk cartridges with capacities ranging from 10 to 20 MB. A later interpretation of this technology was embodied in the so-called Zip media (1994), which could hold up to 100 MB of information on an inexpensive 3.5-inch disk. The format was popular due to its affordable price and good capacity, and Zip disks remained at the crest of popularity until the end of the 1990s. However, CD-Rs that had already appeared at that time could record up to 650 MB, and when their price dropped to a few cents apiece, sales of Zip disks fell catastrophically. Iomega made an attempt to save the technology and developed disks of 250 and 750 MB in size, but by that time CD-Rs had already completely conquered the market. And so Zip became history.

Floppy-disks

A mess in the world of portable media

The resounding success of the Zip Drive in the mid-1990s spawned a mass similar devices, whose manufacturers hoped to grab a piece of the market from Zip. Iomega's main competitors include SyQuest, which first fragmented its own market segment and then ruined its product line with excessive variety - SyJet, SparQ, EZFlyer and EZ135. Another serious, but “murky” rival is Castlewood Orb, which came up with a Zip-like disk with a capacity of 2.2 GB. Finally, Iomega itself has made an attempt to supplement the Zip drive with other types of removable media - from large removable hard drives (1- and 2-GB Jaz Drive) to a miniature 40 MB Clik drive. But none reached the heights of Zip.

Flash is coming

In the early 1980s, Toshiba invented NAND flash memory, but the technology only became popular a decade later, following the advent of digital cameras and PDAs. At this time, it began to be sold in various forms - from large credit cards (intended for use in early handhelds) to CompactFlash cards, SmartMedia, Secure Digital, Memory Stick and xD Picture Card. Flash memory cards are convenient, first of all, because they have no moving parts. In addition, they are economical, durable and relatively inexpensive with ever-increasing memory capacity. The first CF cards held 2 MB, but now their capacity reaches 128 GB.

How much less?!

The IBM/Hitachi promotional slide shows a tiny Microdrive hard drive. It appeared in 2003 and for some time won the hearts of computer users. The iPod and other media players, which debuted in 2001, are equipped with similar devices based on a rotating disk, but manufacturers quickly became disillusioned with such a drive: it was too fragile, energy-intensive and small in volume. So this format is almost “buried”.

The coming of USB. Viva, informacio!

In 1998, the USB era began. The undeniable convenience of USB devices has made them an almost integral part of the lives of all PC users. Over the years, they decrease in physical size, but become more capacious and cheaper. Especially popular were “flash drives”, or USB thumb drives, which appeared in 2000 (from the English thumb - “thumb”), so named for their size - about the size of a human finger. Thanks to their large capacity and small size, USB drives have become perhaps the best storage media invented by mankind.

Virtual reality is coming!