Computer Storage Story

In these days of giga storage, does anyone remember punch cards?

A long long time ago in a galaxy far far away, actually it was here on planet earth 45 years ago, punch cards where used to input your software into a huge mainframe computer, the output would come out the next day on accordion computer paper.



Each card would hold one line of software code. If you had a 200 line program, you would have 200 cards stacked together in a batch. You would submit this batch to the people maintaining the mainframe behemoth. These days, you might sometimes hear somebody say that he had a batch job running, meaning he was running his software overnight or in the background.

Technology improved, people got smarter or where tired of carrying heavy batches of cards for their software. IBM invented the 8 inch floppy with an amazing capacity of 242,000 bytes or characters.



The floppy was a a circle of plastic with a magnetic coat. It was enveloped by a plastic protective case. It was bendable, hence the term floppy disc. Although you could lose your data if you bent your floppy.

Later on the 5 inch floppy came out. That was basically the same except now it was 5 inches in diameter. More improvements came with the last innovation being double sided double density meaning you could write data on both sides of the floppy and the magnetic coating could carry more data. The first floppies for PCs where 150k, followed by 360k.



The IBM AT had 5 inch floppy drives with a massive capacity of 1.2 MB.

Back to the present, you have 80GB storage as standard, and your file size would be measured in megabytes. There is no way you are going to store these on 1.2 MB floppies.



Flash drives where invented that you connect to your PC / Laptop through the USB port. The latest model I saw could carry 2GB of data. Thats a lot!

Now I am waiting for someone to invent a flash drive that does not protrude from your laptop like a small diving board and slides into your computer without fear of damage because you move your laptop around and risk breaking your expensive laptop if you put it down somewhere.