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    5 Old-School Storage Devices That Were Once Essential

    Amelia ScottBy Updated:06 Mins Read Accessories
    5 Old-School Storage Devices That Were Once Essential
    Perhaps the most vital cornerstones of the information age are the ability to store, send, and receive data. Being able to easily write down information and transmit it to someone on the other side of the world may seem commonplace now, but this ability was a complete game-changer when it was first discovered. However, the precise means by which we store data have evolved over the years, primarily through storage devices such as punch cards, floppy disks, and CDs.

    While we dismantled the concept of data storage decades ago, work is underway to gradually increase the amount of data we can store, the speed and ease with which it can be delivered, and the level of storage security. Each era of computer development has brought its own primary data storage medium, gradually rendering the one before obsolete, despite the importance of these old-fashioned computer accessories.

    Punched cards

    In the early, more experimental days of computing, the very idea of ​​storing and quickly reading data was borderline fanciful. Just getting a computer that could handle basic calculations was a monumental ordeal, with major hardware requirements and no space or framework to save those calculations. However, that changed in 1890 with an incredible invention from a humble American census taker named Herman Hollerith: the punch card.

    Hollerith, looking for a more practical way to compile mountains of census data, developed a device that could read the information via paper cards with holes in them. Each punch card was covered in rows of data points, with holes punched to indicate which data point was active. Hollerith’s machine ran these cards, recording the perforations in a way not unlike the scores played by a carnival organ.

    This has exponentially simplified the process of compiling information. While Hollerith’s initial invention was intended for just this purpose, when computing took hold in the 1950s, his punch cards became a means of storing and retrieving information, widely popularized by one of IBM’s revolutionary inventions.

     

    Cassettes

    When you think of cassette tapes, you probably think of cassettes used to store and play music in a boombox. Although this is their most important use, cassette tapes were also used in the 1970s and 1980s as an old-fashioned computer storage device. In fact, it was the format of choice for some professional and consumer computer models, such as the Commodore 64 and the Sinclair Spectrum. Early models of mainframe computers stored data on huge reel-to-reel recorders.

    These coils would be loaded with a magnetic tape on which a series of tones would be recorded via a magnetizing electrical signal. The tones, once analyzed by another computer, could be converted to binary code, which could then be interpreted as simple information. Cassettes worked the same way, with the tapes loaded with magnetic media and recorded in the same way. You can plug a tape recorder into your Commodore 64 computer, run a save command, and the computer will record the tones needed to save your information to the tape. Because cassette tapes were so readily available in the music industry, they were a cheap and abundant means of data storage.

    Floppy disks

    While cassettes were the storage medium of choice for some computers, others went in a different direction: discs wrapped in a flexible plastic sheet. It was this sheet that gave this old-fashioned storage method its colloquial name “floppy disks”, even though the device was more square in shape than round.

    Floppy disks emerged as a method of data storage in the late 1960s and early 1970s, eventually becoming the dominant choice thanks to their compact size and low price. A single disk could hold approximately 80 KB of data and was read through a dedicated 8-inch floppy disk drive. Data could be read and written to the disk surface, but the disks were fragile. In 1984, Apple’s Macintosh computer popularized a new floppy disk format that was reduced to 3.5 inches. The disk was encased in a thicker plastic shell with a sliding metal flap to protect its writable surface, and it could store 1.4 MB of data.

    CD-ROM

    As often seems to be the case, music once again led the way for better data storage formats with the advent of compact discs (CDs) in the early 1980s. Sony designed the first CDs as a new way to store and listen to music, but they quickly became the dominant means of data storage as their speed and storage capacity exceeded those of floppy disks.

    The original CD-ROMs (short for Compact Disc-ROM) were plastic discs with one side covered in tiny pits that were read by a laser. It was ideal for storing information, with a capacity of over 600 MB, but it could not be updated, unlike magnetic storage devices. This problem was solved in the 90s with the development of CD-Recordable (CD-R), which replaced the pits with a special dye layer.

    The chemical composition of this light-sensitive layer could be changed by the disc player’s laser in a process commonly called “engraving.” The process could only run once on a typical CD-R, but this problem was solved with the introduction of rewritable CDs, or CD-RWs. Compact discs became the format of choice for storing data and distributing commercial programs until the early 2000s, a trend further bolstered by the release of higher-capacity DVDs and Blu-Rays.

    USB sticks

    With the mass adoption of the Internet in the late 1990s, physical data storage began to fall out of fashion. After all, why bother buying and burning a CD when you can just send data over the web? However, there was still a market for storage devices, especially if you didn’t have a reliable Internet connection or wanted to quickly transfer things like school and work projects between computers. It was at this time that the USB key found its place.

    USB drives were introduced in the late 1990s. These early drives contained a small circuit board that, when connected to a computer via its USB socket, allowed data to be moved between the computer’s hard drive and the flash drive’s memory.

    The first USB drives offered only 8MB of storage, but this increased to 1GB within a few years, thanks to improved components, making them a popular medium for handling large amounts of data. Even though cloud storage is popular today and USB drives no longer seem essential, they still come in various sizes and capacities for simple, convenient data storage.

     

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