In the first quarter of 2012, a German business software firm (SAP) recorded a 10 per cent increase in profits from the previous year of £478 million from cloud, a method of computer storage (SAP sounds upbeat note as profits continue to rise, 2012). It is clear that methods of storing data on computers have developed rapidly in the past 60 years, from the earliest type of data storage on cylinders to data storage in cloud. The purpose of this essay is to describe this development and show that individual physical memory such as memory sticks and disks are rapidly becoming a thing of the past.
By way of background, before the invention of computers, various methods had been used to store and retrieve data. For example, 1725 saw the invention of the ‘punch card’ widely used in looms and in primitive calculating machines. Although this was a significant development in storage, these cards were not made “general purpose” until 1928. The need to store and retrieve data as one continuous stream and not individual cards brought about the invention of the punch tape in 1846. In 1877, Thomas Edison invented a device known as the ‘Phonograph’. This device recorded sound vibrations on a metal cylinder with a recording needle and played the recordings back when needed. These storage developments served as a background for the development of computer storage.
Professor Federick C. Williams and colleague Tom Kilburn developed the first random access computer memory in 1948 known as the ‘Williams-Kilburn tube’. This device allowed for storage of 1024 bits but was later upgraded to 2048 bits. In 1951 the ‘Delay line memory’ was invented. This form of memory consisted of a column of mercury with piezo crystal to aid in the transfer of data. W...
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- Paul Lilly. (3 February 2009). Computer Data Storage Through the Ages – From Punch Cards to Blu-Ray. Retrieved from http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/computer_data_storage_through_ages on 8 May 2012.
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- Ryan Nichols (31 August 2010). Cloud computing by the numbers: What do all the statistics mean? Retrieved from http://blogs.computerworld.com/16863/cloud_computing_by_the_numbers_what_do_all_the_statistics_mean on 24 May 2012.
- SAP sounds upbeat note as profits continue to rise. (25 April 2012). Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17836653 on 8 May 2012.
Web. 15 Feb. 2014. <http://www.sciencetech.technomuses.ca/english/collection/disk_play.cfm>. Edie, Paul C. "History of the Victor Phonograph." The Victor-Victrola Page.
In the late 1890s, the concept of self-playing piano start to capture the attention of the inventors and the public and several different inventors’ mechanisms were marketed. Player piano has all the characteristic of a piano and it can play by itself. Piano designer and inventor Melville Clark had his very first instrument “Apollo Player Piano”, built with 88note standard in 1901 caused a major impact on the music industry. Player piano is the very first widely successful consumer device that was able to encode the data in binary format. This was done by hand punching rolls ...
The memory capacity of that time was rather limited. “There were not many external drives, the only external drives of that time were I/O cards, I cards and O cards”
Electronic devices were developed around the end of the 19th century when people began to use magnetic audio tape to record sounds. Once sounds could be recorded, they could be manipulated. As musicians across the world began to experiment
Throughout its history, Intel has centered its strategy on the tenets of technological leadership and innovation (Burgelman, 1994). Intel established its reputation for taking calculated risks early on in 1969 by pioneering the metal-oxide semiconductor (MOS) processing technology. This new process technology enabled Intel to increase the number of circuits while simultaneously being able to reduce the cost-per-bit by tenfold. In 1970, Intel once again led the way with the introduction of the world’s first DRAM. While other companies had designed functioning DRAMs, they had failed to develop a process technology that would allow manufacturing of the devices to be commercially viable. By 1972, unit sales for the 1103, Intel’s original DRAM, had accounted for over 90% of the company’s $23.4 million revenue (Cogan & Burgelman, 2004).
Through the 60s and 70s, RAM was the leading memory storage. But this one simple invention has changed everything about the RAM. RAM(random access memory) was known for being big, bulky, and power hungry(lemelson.mit.edu). Because of that, the RAM could not be used to it's fullest. Robert Dennard also saw this, so he started to create a chip that can hold hundreds of thousands of RAM inside the one simple invention, the DRAM stick(lemelson.mit.edu).
The cloud storage services are important as it provides a lot of benefits to the healthcare industry. The healthcare data is often doubling each and every year and consequently this means that the industry has to invest in hardware equipment tweak databases as well as servers that are required to store large amounts of data (Blobel, 19). It is imperative to understand that with a properly implemented a cloud storage system, and hospitals can be able to establish a network that can process tasks quickly with...
Edison decided to change the idea by using a tin foil wrapped metal cylinder instead of the paper. The final cylinder phonograph had 2 diaphragm and needle units. One would be for recording date and the other would be for playing it. For the machine to work, one would have to speak into a mouthpiece and the sound vibrations would be imprinted on the cylinder. Then the recording needle would create some sort of groove pattern on the cylinder. The data can then played by back by the data from the created grooves.
The evolution of faster computers and larger computer programs has made it necessary to develop newer and faster ways to store large masses of data. Constant advances from 5 ¼ inch floppies, to 3 ½ inch floppies, to high capacity floppies, to zip drives, to CD-RW drives make it seem like by the time you upgrade, the technology is already obsolete. So what is the near future of storage media. The newest storage media that is rapidly advancing on the CD-RW is the DVD-RW. DVD-RW drives are decreasing in price, almost as fast as they’re increasing in speed. Over the last 18 months, their price has cut in half, and it’s easy to see that in the near future, DVD-RW drives will be the standard for storage media.
Ever since I have used a computer, I have been captivated by the incredible world of the digital industry. One of the earliest memories I have was to use a floppy disk, the idea of capturing something virtual and integrating it into a physical object fascinated me. As technology has advanced so has its implements, I recall the floppy disk being as big as my hand and to now hold a memory stick smaller than my thumb with 91022.2 times more storage capacity just astonishes me. The advancement of computers at this exponential rate makes me wonder what amazing phenomena could occur in the next century and by studying computer science I can be part of this exponential growth.
The primary computer storage medium, before the introduction of magnetic storage, was punch cards. These were paper cards on which holes were punched to indicate binary data invented by Herman Hollerith in the late nineteenth century. In June 1949, a group of scientists and engineers in IBM began working on creating a new storage device that would soon revolutionize the industry. May 21, 1952 marked the transition from punched-card calculators to electronic computers as IBM introduced the IBM 726 Tape Unit [1]. It was used to store data in IBM’s first commercial scientific computer intended to help the US military to design aircrafts [2]. Four years later, IBM made the first computer disk storage system: the 305 RAMAC drive. Although this drive could only store 5MB of data, information could be stored directly to any location on the disk surface without having to read all the information in between which was the case in magnetic tapes. This ability to access random locations had a very important effect on computer performance and enabled data to be stored and retrieved much faster than tapes. The next 60 years saw a huge progress in the magnetic storage industry from a variety of hard disks to portable memory such as cassette tapes, floppy disks and zip drives. Today, one can store even 3TB data on tiny 3.5 inch drives. This was all possible due to electromagnetism and the magnetic properties of ferromagnetic materials such as the oxides of iron[ add the magnetism part]
The Von Neumann bottleneck is a limitation on material or data caused by the standard personal computer architecture. Earlier computers were fed programs and data for processing while they were running. Von Neumann created the idea behind the stored program computer, our current standard model. In the Von Neumann architecture, programs and data are detained or held in memory, the processor and memory are separate consequently data moves between the two. In that configuration, latency or dormancy is unavoidable. In recent years, processor speeds have increased considerably. Memory enhancements, in contrast, have mostly been in size or volume. This enhancement gives it the ability to store more data in less space; instead of focusing on transfer rates. As the speeds have increased, the processors now have spent an increasing amount of time idle, waiting for data to be fetched from the memory. All in all, No matter how fast or powerful a...
The fist computer, known as the abacus, was made of wood and parallel wires on which beads were strung. Arithmetic operations were performed when the beads were moved along the wire according to “programming” rules that had to be memorized by the user (Soma, 14). The second earliest computer, invented by Blaise Pascal in 1694, was a “digital calculating machine.” Pascal designed this first known digital computer to help his father, who was a tax collector. Pascal’s computer could only add numbers, and they had to be entered by turning dials (Soma, 32). It required a manual process like its ancestor, the abacus. Automation was introduced in the early 1800’s by a mathematics professor named Charles Babbage. He created an automatic calculation machine that was steam powered and stored up to 1000 50-digit numbers. Unlike its two earliest ancestors, Babbage’s invention was able to perform various operations. It relied on cards with holes punched in them, which are called “punch cards.” These cards carried out the programming and storing operations for the machine. Unluckily, Babbage’s creation flopped due to the lack of mechanical precision and the lack of demand for the product (Soma, 46). The machine could not operate efficiently because technology was t adequate to make the machine operate efficiently Computer interest dwindled for many years, and it wasn’t until the mid-1800’s that people became interested in them once again.
Several types of cloud storage systems have been developed to supporting both personal and business uses. Cloud storage also a model of networked enterprise storage where the data is stored not only in the user's computer, but also in virtualized of storage, which generally hosted by third parties company.
These statistics are amazing, but even more amazing is the development of computers. Now in 2005, in this short 68-year period, computer technology has changed its entire look; now, we use computer chips instead of vacuum tubes and circuit board instead of wires. The changes in size and speed are probably the biggest. When we look at computers today, it is very hard to imagine computers 60 years ago were such big, heavy monsters.