A Brief History of Backup and Storage

Punch Card

Punch Tape

Magnetic Tape

Tape Drive

Hard Drive

Floppy Disk

1775 19511846 1952 1956 1971 1985

Computer-Readable CD-ROM

1972

Cassette

PUNCH CARDIn 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

PUNCH TAPE

Approximate Years in Use: 1846 - 1990s

Originally pioneered by textile industry for use with mechanized looms

Each row on tape represented one character

MAGNETIC TAPEFirst 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

TAPE DRIVEIntroduced 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

HARD DRIVEFirst 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

FLOPPY DISKFirst 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”)

CASSETTE

Approximate Years in Use: 1972 to late 1980s

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

COMPUTER-READABLE CD-ROM

Approximate Years in Use: 1985- present

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