a brief history of backup and storage

1. A Brief History of Backup
and Storage
1775 1846 1951 1952 1956 1971 1972 1985
Punch Card Magnetic Cassette
Hard
Tape Drive
Floppy Computer-
Punch Tape Tape Disk Readable
Drive CD-ROM

2. PUNCH CARD
In common use until mid-1970s,
when replaced by magnetic tape
Used as early as 1725 in textile
industry for controlling mechanized
textile looms
Approximate Years in Use: 1725 - 1925

3. PUNCH TAPE
Originally pioneered by textile
industry for use with mechanized
looms
Each row on tape represented one
character
Approximate Years in Use: 1846 - 1990s

4. MAGNETIC TAPE
First used in 1951 to record
computer data on the Eckert-
Mauchly UNIVAC I
Tapes were metal and 1200 feet
long (365 meters) and very heavy
Long length made it prone to tears
and breaks
Approximate Years in Use: 1951- present

5. TAPE DRIVE
Introduced in 1952 by IBM
Used vacuum columns to buffer
nickel-plated magnetic tape to
prevent media from tearing
Some tapes were 1,200 feet long
Replaced equivalent of 12,500
punch cards
Capacity of 2 million digits per tape
Approximate Years in Use: 1951- present

6. HARD DRIVE
First hard disk drive, IBM Model 350
Disk File, shipped in 1956 with IBM
305 RAMAC computer.
Computer itself was 30’ by 50” (9m
x 15m); storage device itself—the
first commercial hard disk drive–
was a 1.5-meter cube.
Approximate Years in Use: 1956- present

7. FLOPPY DISK
First floppy disk released by IBM in
1971. Read-only, 8″ in diameter,
stored 80 kB
Intended as portable, more reliable
medium vs punched cards, magnetic
tape
8” disks too large for new
microcomputers of 1970s, so 5¼”
disk created; 3½” floppy followed
Approximate Years in Use: 1971- 1982 (8” & 5 ¼”)
1982-2009 (3 ½”)

8. CASSETTE
Introduced for audio use by Philips
in Europe in 1963
Introduced in 1972 as storage
medium for PCs
Standard 90-minute cassette stored
700KB of data per side
Used on ZX Spectrum, TRS-80,
Commodore 64, and others
Approximate Years in Use: 1972 to late 1980s

9. COMPUTER-READABLE
CD-ROM
Optical disc invented in 1958; first
commercial product, Laserdisk,
introduced in 1978
First audio compact disc introduced
in 1982; eventually obsoleted
magnetic tape
Computer-readable data-storing CD-
ROMs introduced in 1985.
By late ’90s, CD-ROM disks and
drives had obsoleted floppies
Approximate Years in Use: 1985- present