5 Old-School Storage Devices That Were Once Essential

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 security of its storage. Each era of computer development has come with its own primary data storage medium, gradually rendering the one that came before it obsolete, despite the importance of these old-fashioned computer accessories.

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.

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 translated into binary code, which could then be read as simple information. Cassettes worked in the same way, with the tapes in question being loaded with magnetic tape 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, thanks to their ubiquity in the music industry, they were a cheap and abundant means of data storage.

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 cheap 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, which was reduced in size to 3.5 inches. The disk was encased in a thicker plastic shell, which had a sliding metal flap to protect the disk’s writable surface, and could store 1.4 MB of data.

The original CD-ROMs (short for Read-Only Memory) were plastic discs with one side covered in tiny pits coded with data read by a laser. It was ideal for storing information, with a capacity of over 600 MB, but it could not be saved with new information, unlike magnetic storage devices. This problem was solved in the 90s with the development of CD-Recordable, CD-R for short, 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 saving data and distributing commercial programs until the early 2000s, further bolstered by the release of higher capacity DVDs and Blu-Rays.

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 only offered 8MB of storage space, but this increased to 1GB within a few years, thanks to better components, making it 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 different sizes and capacities for simple and convenient data storage.