If you are a pro in hard drive recovery it's really important to know your history. Tracing the roots of our present day tiny information storage media devices is an interesting tale of man’s inventiveness. What we have now would’ve been called nothing but science fiction by our forebears.
Our contemporaries can only go as far back as the cassette tape but little did we all know that there have been attempts made even before that, for effective data storage devices. Like the awkward, bumbling attempts of man to fly by means of balloons, the history or evolution of information storage media is a story worth telling.
Selectron Tube
The Selectron tube was a 1ox3 inches information storage device which was devised in 1946 but never actually took off due to production issues. It was so long as an one-foot ruler and as thick as a large flashlight. It can hold only up to 32 to 512 bytes, which, with such cumbersome size and an estimated value of about $500 each, wouldn’t have been cost effective to sell.
Punch Cards
Punch cards had been produced straight after the death of the Selectron tube but the underlying principle has been used for mechanised textile looms in the textile industry as far back as 1725. Punch cards were also employed in organs and other instruments and in some voting devises.
A punch card, true to its name, is a card or stiff paper with holes or punches. Digital info is stored by the absence or presence of holes at predefined positions.
Punched Tape
Similar to a punch card, the punched tape was an information storage device which is a roll of tape punched with holes. Its beginnings can also be traced to motorized looms. Each row on the tape has different configurations of punched holes which pertain to a single character. This may be used both to input info into early computers and also to output information.
Magnetic Drum Memory
This was literally a drum sort of info storage device and was not in any fashion convenient. For all its bulk, it could only hold 10 kilobytes but was generally used in the 1950′s and 60′s as the main working memory of computers. Later , magnetic drum memories of only 16 inches in length were made.
Hard Drive
The first ever disk drive was the IBM Model 350 Disk File which came with the IBM computer in 1956. It was also enormous as it contained 50 pieces of 24-inch storage discs which all together can hold about 5 million characters or only 5 MB. The first hard disk which could store 2 GB was developed in the 1980′s but was the dimensions of a chiller and at a limiting cost of $80,000 to $140,000.
After these early forms of info storage media came what we now recognise in our current generation: the laser disk, the cassette tape and the floppy disks. Actually, the history of info storage has come a great distance and the science behind it shows no evidence of slowing down yet.
Jason Sloan runs a data recovery business called Kingdom Data Recovery Scotland who service all of the UK. He has got many articles on his web site which refer to issues with storage and helpful info about stopping data loss.