Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The History of Data Storage

Starting point is 00:00:00 If you have used a computer, which I'm assuming everyone listening to this has, you've probably had to store your data somewhere. You may have used a USB drive, a hard drive, or if you're old enough, maybe even a floppy drive. These types of data storage are just the latest in a long line of methods to store information that goes back a surprising amount of time. Learn more about the history of data storage and how it goes back further than you might realize on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. If your perceptions about the past were wrong. ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed.

Starting point is 00:00:53 It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. The topic of this episode is data storage. And I should be very clear about what I am and what I am not going to talk about. I'm not going to be talking about writing. I've covered the history of writing and books in several previous episodes. While text and writing do qualify as data, that isn't the focus of the show.

Starting point is 00:01:27 Likewise, I'm also not going to be covering things like random access memory or RAM, which is found in computers. This is technically data storage, but it's short-term memory that disappears once the computer is turned off. I'm going to be focusing on data that can be stored long-term. So with that, most people assume that data storage began with the advent of computers. And that is false. The forerunners of what would eventually become computer storage actually began in the 18th century, well before the development of computers or even electricity. And the origin can be found in the year 1725.

Starting point is 00:02:06 Bezile Bouchon was a French textile worker and inventor who made a significant contribution to the automation of the textile industry by developing an early form of the programmable loom. His invention used a perforated paper tape to control the weaving pattern, thus allowing for complex designs and textiles. The tape guided a loom operator, allowing them to consistently create the same weave on the cloth

Starting point is 00:02:29 that they were making. This served really more as a guide for the operator, but the paper tape did store data about the weaving pattern on it. It was a very crude beginning, but Bouchon's invention laid the foundation for what was to come. Another French weaver, Joseph Marie Jacquard, made the next big advancement in 1801, developing what became known as the Jacquard Loom. The Jacquard Loom was a mechanical loom that revolutionized the textile industry

Starting point is 00:02:56 by introducing a method to automatically control the weaving of complex patterns. The loom used a series of punch cards to control the movement of the loom's heddles, which in turn lifted and lowered the warp threads to create intricate patterns. The Jacquard loom differed from Bouchon's earlier invention in that it used punch cards instead of a paper tape and was designed to be read by a machine rather than used as a guide for a loom operator. The loom used a series of punch cards each representing one row of the design. The holes in the cars corresponded to positions where a warp thread should be lifted. And here I'll refer you back to my episode on cloth and textiles.

Starting point is 00:03:35 Where there was a hole in the punch card, a pin passed through, allowing a corresponding hook to remain engaged. Where there's no hole, the pin pushes the hook away. The idea of punch cards as a system for storing data for machines caught on after the Gaccard loom. Charles Babbage, who proposed the first mechanical computing device and who I covered in a previous episode, proposed the use of punch cards to store information. In 1884, Herman Holerith, an American statistician, patented a punch card system to process data for the 1890 U.S. Census. His method used punch cards to store data that could be read and tabulated by machines, significantly speeding up data processing. Again, this was not digital data as we

Starting point is 00:04:21 know it. The information being stored wasn't binary ones and zeros, but it certainly was data. For example, one spot on a card might indicate if a person was or was not married. Hololith developed the first key punch machine to put holes and punch cards as well as as the first card feed mechanism. In 1896, he founded the tabulating machine company, which instituted a host of innovations with respect to card reading and manipulation. In 1911, his company and three other competitors joined together to form a new larger company, known as Computing Tabulating Recording Company. The president of that company was Thomas J. Watson, and in 1924, it was renamed the International Business Machine Corporation.

Starting point is 00:05:08 or more commonly known as IBM. IBM became the leader in business machines, and punch cards became the primary method of storing data. By 1937, IBM was producing 5 to 10 million punch cards per day. During the Second World War, work on decrypting the Nazi Enigma machines resulted in Betelie Park in the UK going through 2 million punch cards themselves every single week.

Starting point is 00:05:36 These machines that were using, punch cards were electronic, but they were not computers, as we might think of them today. When early computers were developed, punch cards were the natural choice for data storage. The first general-purpose digital computer, ENAC, built in 1945, used punch cards as the input and output mechanism. The problem with punch cards were obvious. They took up a lot of space and were slow to read and write data. A solution to the problems of data storage was a technology developed in Austria by Gustav Taushek in 1932, magnetic drum memory. It consisted of a cylindrical drum coated with a ferromagnetic material. Data was stored on the drum in the form of magnetic

Starting point is 00:06:23 patterns which could be read and written by read and writeheads. Positioned along the length of the drum, each track had its own dedicated read-righthead. The These heads were fixed in place and didn't move, unlike the heads in modern disc drives. Data was written to the drum by changing the magnetic orientation of the material on the surface. A right head would apply a magnetic field to a spot on the drum, aligning the magnetic domains in one direction to represent a binary one or the opposite direction for a binary zero. Magnetic drum memory was a common method of storing data for computers in the 1950s and early 1960s. During this time, punch cards did not die out. In fact, they increased in popularity due to the

Starting point is 00:07:09 increased use of computers. However, magnetic drum memory could be improved. When the world's first mass-produced computer, the IBM 650 shipped in 1954, it had drum storage that held 17.5 kilobytes of data. To put that into perspective, that would be less than one second of audio of an average episode of this podcast. Drums were not an ideal form for a magnetic medium. Another magnetic-based system was one that had been popularized for audio recordings, magnetic tapes. If you ever see a movie showing a computer from like the late 1950s or 1960s, they'll often be running magnetic tapes in the background. IBM's magnetic tape system became the standard, and it really wasn't that much different from magnetic audio tapes. The tapes were a half-inch or 12.7 millimeters wide and were

Starting point is 00:08:03 wound up on removable reels. In the early 1950s, the first Univac computers had tape storage of about 1.1 megabytes. By the early 1970s, a nine-track, 2,400-foot-long reel from IBM could store about 140 megabytes of data. Tapes too had big problems, primarily because they were linear. If you had a tape that was 2,400 feet long, you had to go through the entire tape to get to something that was at the end. What was needed was a means of magnetic storage where you could arbitrarily access any part of the stored data immediately. Instead of a drum or a tape, the ideal form was a disc.

Starting point is 00:08:47 IBM introduced hard disk drives in 1956. The first hard disk drive was the IBM 350 disk storage unit. The 350 was the size of multiple large filing cabinets and could store a whopping 3.75 megabytes of data. They became popular for many applications because they allowed for random access to data which could not be done with tapes. All of these storage formats that I've mentioned coexisted with each other throughout the 1960s. Punch cards eventually lost out to magnetic tapes during the 1970s. All of these systems I've mentioned were used for large corporal. computers because at the time those were the only things that existed. These storage systems were

Starting point is 00:09:30 very large and very expensive. In the late 1960s, the random access element of a disc were put into a removable format that became known as a floppy disk. Not surprisingly, IBM developed the first floppy disks. The first floppy disks were sold to the public in 1972 and they were eight inches in diameter, much larger than the discs that you're probably familiar with. Although, originally called the Type 1 diskette, the term floppy was used almost immediately. In 1976, a company known as

Starting point is 00:10:02 Shugart Associates introduced the 5 and a quarter inch disk, which became a standard format. With the advent of personal computers in the 1980s, these large mainframe tape systems wouldn't work. They were too bulky and too expensive to be used in the home.

Starting point is 00:10:18 The floppy disk worked perfectly with smaller personal computers. Double-sided disks and higher density disc were eventually introduced. In 1981, a team at Sony developed the 3.5 inch floppy disk. Unlike the 5 and a quarter inch disc, which were actually sort of floppy, the 3.5 inch disc was encased in a hard plastic container, but it was still called a floppy disk. The most popular version of this disc, which became a standard for almost every personal computer, could hold 1.44 megabytes of data. Hard disk drives also improved their storage density.

Starting point is 00:10:54 in size, but they weren't a part of the first generation of personal computers. It would be several years before hard drives became standard. I remember seeing my very first hard drive during my freshman year of college. The guy who lived next door to me in my dorm had a 10-megabyte hard drive for his Apple 2E, and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. As computers became more powerful, computer programs became larger, and by the early to mid-1990s, they outstripped the size of floppy disks. As this was way before broadband internet, almost all software sales at the time were done with physical media. The solution was to use the media format which was originally designed for audio, compact disks. The first format was known as CD-ROM, which stood for read-only memory.

Starting point is 00:11:43 Unlike floppy disks, CD-ROMs could only be read and nothing could be written to them. I'm going to end the story of data storage here because while there have been continual advancements, particularly in optical storage, those are going to be for a future episode due to time constraints. But I want to end by noting how so many of these data storage formats that I've mentioned have never totally gone obsolete. There are always a few systems somewhere in the world that just never got updated and continue to use antiquated data storage decades after everybody assumed it was gone. While punch cards mostly disappeared in the 1970s, there were still some voting systems that used punch cards into the early 2000s.

Starting point is 00:12:28 Floppy disks still haven't been rendered totally extinct, despite the fact that it's been years since computers have been made with floppy drives. Sony was the last manufacturer of three-and-a-half-inch floppy disks. They ceased production in March of 2011. There is currently only one company that sells the remaining supply of floppy disks, floppydiss.com. Tom Persky, the owner of the company, purchased the remaining supply when production ceased, and he has slowly been selling the remaining stock over the last 13 years.

Starting point is 00:12:59 They're down to just a few hundred thousand disks, and he estimates that the rest of the supply will be exhausted in the next year or two. Eventually, all the people who are still using three-and-a-half-inch floppy disks because they never upgraded their computers are eventually going to have to do something when the last remaining disks are exhausted. As shocking as people still using three-and-a-half-inch floppy disk might be, there are a lot of the internet. some systems out there that are even older, and I'm not even talking about 5 and a quarter inch disks. The United States Air Force was using the really old 8-inch floppy disks to manage its nuclear arsenal up until the year 2019. Likewise, magnetic tape drives are still alive and well. In 2000,

Starting point is 00:13:46 a new tape format called Linear Tape Open or LTO was introduced. LTO is not an obsolete format. It's been upgraded several times and the current format known as LTO9 can hold 18 terabytes of data in one tape cartridge. These tapes are primarily used for backing up and archiving data. Hard drives, of course, are still around, even if they too are becoming more and more rare in new computers. Most new computers have SSD drives, which stands for solid-state drives. They're faster than traditional magnetic hard drives and have become competitive in size. Almost everything you do online is all being hosted somewhere at a server farm with banks of magnetic hard drives. As I mentioned at the top of the episode, the earliest origins of data storage date back to the 18th century.

Starting point is 00:14:37 And if the legacy systems that still use floppy drives or any indication, there's probably still some textile amel out there using punch cards for their Jacquard loom. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Ben Long and Cameron Kiefer. I have a correction to make. In my episode on Home Field Advantage, I said that Seattle's Lumen Field, home to the Seattle Seahawks, had the loudest fan volume ever recorded. Many people have brought it to my attention

Starting point is 00:15:08 that that record was broken by the crowd at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, which reached a peak volume in 2014 of 142.2. As the Chiefs have won the last two Super Bowls, maybe there's something to the volume of the fans. Remember that if you leave a review or send me a boostagram, you too can have it read on the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The History of Data Storage

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