Long history of storage devices (part 1)

When I jump over thousand years of cave paintings and using of papyrus, leaves or stones as a main storage of information, the invention of printing press by Johannes Gutenberg (1440) was really a milestone in the history of information storage. Gutenberg's mechanical movable type printing  played a key role in the development of the Renaissance, Reformation and the Scientific Revolution and laid the material basis for the modern knowledge-based economy and spread of learning to the masses.

A 15th century printing press similar to the one Gutenberg invented 

Punched Card (1750)

Punched cards or "Hollerith cards" were made of stiff board, the punch card represents information by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions on the card. They were widely used throughout 19th and 20th century for controlling textile looms and operating fairground organs and related instruments.

Semen Korsakov was reputedly the first who used the punched cards in informatics for information store and search (1832).

Later in 1890 Herman Hollerith invented the recording of data on a medium that could then be read by a machine. Hollerith founded Tabulating Machine Company (1896), later renamed IBM.  IBM developed punched card technology into a powerful tool for business data-processing and produce an extensive line of general purpose unit record machines.

Jacquard Punch Card Loom. Photo by George P. Landow.

Original Hollerith punch card

Above left: Punched card reader. Above right: Punched card writer.

Punched tape (1845)

Long strip of paper in which holes are punched to store data. The earliest forms of punched tape come from looms and embroidery. Punched tape was widely used  for teleprinter communication, and later as a storage medium for minicomputers and CNC machine tools.

Paper tapes were still in use in the 1970s through the early 1980s to transfer binary data for incorporation in either mask-programmable read-only memory (ROM) chips or their erasable counterparts - EPROMs.

Computer read instructions from punched paper tape at UNIVAC plant in Utica New York 

Manual code tape machine 

Magnetic tape (1928)

Developed in Germany in 1928. Made of a thin magnetic coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic. 

First data were recorded in 1951 on the Mauchly - Eckert UNIVAC 1. The recording medium was a 1/2 inch wide thin band of nickel-plated bronze. 

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Above left: Magnetic tape control unit. Above right: Data reader.

Magnetic drum (1932)

Drum was an early form of computer memory that was widely used in 1950s and 1960s. It was invented by Gustav Tauschek in 1932 in Austria. For many machines (ex. UNIVAC 1), a drum formed the main working memory. The capacity of a drum of 20cm long and 10cm in diameter was about 500.000 bit. Drums were later replaced by core memory, which was faster, with no moving parts.

Magnetic drum storage unit (UNIVAC 1 )

IBM 650 Magnetic Drum

Selectron Tube

Early form of digital computer memory developed by Jan A. Rajchman in 1946, memory storage device proved expensive and suffered from production problems. Selectron tube had capacity of 256 to 4096 bits. 

Selectron tube

Hard Disk

A hard disk drive uses rigid rotating platters. It stores and retrieves digital data from a planer magnetic surface. The first HDD was the IBM Model 350 Disk File that came with the IBM 350 RAMAC computer in 1956. The total storage capacity was 5 million characters (just under 5MB) and weighted more then 200kg. 

IBM hard disk drive fork lifted onto the plane, 1956

Foreground, two IBM 350 Disk Storage Units in operation

Music tape 

The compact audio cassette audio storage medium was introduced by Philips in 1963.

Audio compact cassette

DRAM

Dynamic random access memory is a type of random access memory that stores each single bit of information in a separate capacitor within an integrated circuit. Using one-transistor cells paved the way for the worldwide explosion of the computing. 

Invented in 1966 by Dr. Robert Dennard. 

DRAM

Twistor memory (1968)
Twistor memory was developed at Bell Labs and it used the same concept as the core memory. Twistor memory was formed by wrapping or closing magnetic tape arround current-carrying wire. Twistor was used only a brief time between 1968 and 1970. In this period all previous forms of memory were replaced by RAM chips.


Bubble memory (1970)
Bubble memory uses a thin film of a magnetic material to hold small magnetized areas, known as bubbles, each of which stores one bit of data. Bubble memory started out as a promising technology, but failed commercially as hard disk prices fell rapidly in 1980s.

Buble memory developed by Andrew Bobeck

8" floppy disk
In 1971 IBM introduced a data storage device composed of a circular piece of thin, flexible, magnetic storage medium encased in a square plastic wallet . The capacity of 8-inch floppy disk was about 100K bytes (100,000 characters). 

8-inch floppy disk

5,25" floppy disk
In 1976, Alan Slugart developed a new smaller version of the 8" floppy disk. The main reason for this development was that the normal version (8-inch floppy disk) was too large for desktop computers. 
In 1978 a double-sided drive for reading 5.25" floppy disk was introduced. So the storage capacity was increased from 100K bytes to 360K bytes.




1976
Apple's external floppy disk drive (5,25").

Apple A9M0110 PC 5.25 Floppy Drive

VHS
The Video Home System is a consumer - level video standard developed by Japanese company JVC and introduced in 1976.

CD
First compact disk was introduced by Sony in September 1976. But the idea to use light for recording and replaying music was few years older.  
Standard compact discs have a diameter of 120mm, though 80mm versions exist in circular and "business-card" forms.


The first CD player was called Sony CDP-101 and was presented on the 1st of October 1982. The price was 625 US dollar.

Diagram of CD layers

First CD player Sony CDP-101

3,5" Floppy disk
In 1981, Sony introduced the first 3,5" floppy drives and diskettes. These floppies were encased in hard plastic. They stored 400Kb of data, and later 720Kb (double-density) and 1.44Mb (high-density).
Floppy disk were in use more than 20 years. In 2003, Dell stopped including floppy drivers on their standard home computers. By 2007 PC world had also stopped selling the disks. And Sony is shutting down Japanese floppy disk sales by March 2011. 

8", 5,25", 3,5" floppy disks.

8", 5,25", 3,5" floppy drives

Milestones in Information Technology and Systems up to 1960

One of the biggest milestones in the history of computers is the transistor. American physicists John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain, and William Shockley invented the transistor in 1947. The first transistor was created at Bell Laboratories on December 16, 1947. “This was perhaps the most important electronics invention of the 20th century.
Before we jump to a world of modern computers let me show you the early inventions that improved and changed the way of computing.

Abacus
Abacus was the first leap forward in computing between 1000 BC and 500 BD (we can still find it in the middle east asia countries). This apparatus used a series of moveable beads or rocks. The standard abacus can be used to perform addition, subtraction, division and multiplication; the abacus can also be used to extract square-roots and cubic roots.

Chinese Abacus

Roman Abacus

Antikythera mechanism
An ancient astronomical computer built by the Greeks around 80 BC.

Antikythera mechanism

Programmable analog computer
The "Castle clock", an astronomical clock invented by Al-Jazari in 1206, is considered to be the earliest programmable analog computer. It displayed the zodiac, the solar and lunar orbits, a crescent moon-shaped pointer travelling across a gateway causing automatic doors to open every hour, and five robotic musicians who played music when struck by levers operated by a camshaft attached to a water wheel.

Illustration from Al-Jazari's book

Watch
In 1502 Peter Henlein, a craftsman from Nuremberg Germany, creates a first portable spring-driven watch (called a watch because it was first used by watchmen).

Napier's Bones
Napier's bones, also called Napier's rods, were invented by eccentric scotsman named John Napier in 1617. Napier's bones are numbered rods which can be used to perform multiplication of any number by a number 2-9. By placing "bones" corresponding to the multiplier on the left side and the bones corresponding to the digits of the multiplicand next to the right, and product can be read off simply by adding pairs of numbers (with appropriate carries as needed) in the row determined by the multiplier.

Napier's bones

Slide Rule
Napier's invention lead directly to the slide rule, first built in England in 1632 by clergyman William Oughtred and still in use in the 1960's by the NASA engineers of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs which landed men on the moon.

A slide rule consists of two movable rulers placed side by side. Each ruler is marked in such a way that the actual distance from the beginning of the rulers is equally proportioned to the logarithms of the numbers printed on the ruler. One can easily and quickly multiply or divide by sliding the rulers.

Slide rule

Shickard's Calculating Clock
Invented by the German professor Wilhelm Schickard in 1623. Shickard's clock is the first true mechanical calculator. It could add, subtract, multiply, and divide. It operated on six-digit numbers and rang a bell to announce overflow.
Shickard's invention was lost when he and his entire family were killed by plague in the mid-1630s. In the 1950s a sketch by Schickard of his mechanism was discovered among Kepler's papers at the Pulkovo Observatory near Leningrad, Russia. Profressor Bruno Baron von Freytag Loringhoff, from the University of Tübingen, Germany, used the sketch to build a working copy of Schickard's machine. This device now resides in the Computer Museum of America.

Calculating clock

Pascaline
The Pascaline, invented by Blaise Pascal in France in 1642, was a mechanical calculator that could add and subtract directly.

8-digit version of the Pascaline

Mechanical Calculator (1672)
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz managed to build a digital mechanical four-function (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) calculator that he called the stepped reckoner. Although the stepped reckoner employed the decimal number system. Leibniz was the first to advocate use of the binary number system which is fundamental to the operation of modern computers.

Liebniz's Stepped Reckoner

Punched Cards
Punched card is a piece of stiff paper that contains digital information represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions. They were used around 1725 as a more robust form of the perforated paper rolls, then in use for controlling textile looms in France. Punched cards were widely used through the 19th and 20th centuries. Early digital computers used punched cards, often prepared using keypunch machines, as the primary medium for input of both computer programs and data. Some voting machines used punched cards.

Jacquard's punched card used to controle textile loops

The Jacquard loom, on display at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, England, was one of the first programmable devices.

Calculator

In 1820 Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar made a machine, the 'arithmometer', based on Leibniz's design that was capable of performing four operations in a simple and reliable way. His machine was very successful. Around 1500 Thomas's machines were constructed between 1820 and 1878.

Thomas's calculator

Difference Engine 

By 1822 the English mathematician Charles Babbage was proposing a steam driven calculating machine the size of a room, which he called the Difference Engine. Machine was design to calculate logarithms, but the engine proved exceedingly difficult to maintain and the project soon became the most expensive government funded project up to that point in English history. The device was never built.

Babbage's difference engine

Telegraph

A telegraph was an early invention that communicated messages at a distance over a wire using electricity. It was later replaced by the telephone. The word telegraphy comes from the Greek words tele which means faraway, and grapho which means write.

The first attempts to send signals by electricity (telegraph) had been made many times before Joseph Henry, but Joseph discovered the essential mechanics behind the electric telegraph. This discovery was made in 1831, a full year before Samuel Morse invented the telegraph.  

Analytical Machine
Charles Babbage designs the Analytical Machine (an important step in the history of computers) that follows instructions from punched-cards. It is the first general purpose computer.

Analytical Engine - First fully-automatic calculating machine

Electromechanical Relay
In 1838 Joseph Henry invented the electromechanical relay (an electric switch).


First Computer Program
In 1842-1843, Lady Ada Byron (Countess of Lovelace and daughter of  Lord Byron) translated an article about Charles Babbage's purposed Analytic Engine. In her notes, she describes an algorithm that is cited as "the first computer program", making her the first computer programmer.

Lady Ada Byron

Mechanical computer
1855 - the brothers George and Edward Scheutz  from Stockholm, built the first practical mechanical computer based on the work of Charles Babbage.




Typewriter & QWERTY Keyboard
In 1868 Christopher Sholes invented the first commercially successful typewriter in the United States utilizing the QWERTY keyboard layout in an effort to reduce the frequency of typebar jams. Why this is still the default English keyboard used today is a mystery.

Sholes typewritter from 1872

Telephone
In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray, two independent inventors  designed devices that could transmit speech electrically (the telephone). Both men rushed their respective designs to the patent office within hours of each other, Alexander Graham Bell patented his telephone first. Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell entered into a famous legal battle over the invention of the telephone, which Bell won.

Early Bell Telephone

Punch-card tabulating machine (1888)
Hollerith's invention, known as the Hollerith desk, consisted of a card reader, a gear driven mechanism which could count (using Pascal's mechanism which we still see in car odometers), and a large wall of dial indicators displaying results.

Hollerith's punched card tabulator

Tabulating Machine Company
1889, a patent was issued for Hollerith tabulating machine. In 1896 Herman Hollerith started the Tabulating Machine Company, the company later became the well-known computer company IBM.

Cathode Ray Tube (CRT)
In 1897, German scientist Karl Ferdinand Braun invented the Cathode-Ray Oscilloscope, also known as the Braun tube or  Cathode-Ray Tube. It was a cold-cathode diode, a modification of the Crookes tube with a phosphor-coated screen, but it won't be until 1928 (31 years later) that it is used for Television.


Television
Georges Rignoux and A. Fournier created the first demonstration of a very basic television  in Paris .


Z1
The Z1 was a mechanical computer designed by Konrad Zuse from 1935-1938. It was a binary electrically driven mechanical calculator with limited programmability, reading instructions from punched tape. This computer was destroyed during the bombarding of Berlin, during Ward War II in December 1943.

The Z1 was the first in a series of computers that Zuse designed.

ENIAC
Electric Numerical Integrator And Computer, the world's first commercial electronic digital computer. The machine was built by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly in 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania.
ENIAC contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and around 5 million hand-soldered joints. It weighed 30 short tons (27 t), was roughly 8.5 by 3 by 80 feet (2.6 m × 0.9 m × 24 m), took up 680 square feet (63 m²), and consumed 150 kW of power.
ENIAC had an inflexible architecture which essentially required rewiring to change its programming.















 

The Day time stopped

I really enjoy the days you find something absolutely unexpected just in front of your house, in your back garden or in the middle of nowhere. I remember the day  I found a piece of salmon in the back yard and you know...the next day salmon was gone. 


But that's not what I want to talk about. I want to show you two pics I took a long time ago. I think I start to collect pics with armchairs.