Data Recovery Cf Memory Card
A Potted History of Data Storage
If you are an expert in hard drive recovery it is important to know your history. Tracing the roots of our modern day little data storage media devices is a fascinating tale of man’s ingenuity. What we have now would be called nothing but science fiction by our predecessors.
Our contemporaries can only go as far back as the cassette tape but little did we know that there have been attempts made even before that, for effective data storage devices. Like the clutzy, blundering attempts of man to fly by way of balloons, the history or growth of information storage media is a story worth telling.
Selectron Tube
The Selectron tube was a 1ox3 inches data storage medium which was fashioned in 1946 but never truly took off due to production problems. It was so long as an one-foot ruler and as thick as a large flash-lamp. It can hold only up to 32 to 512 bytes, which, with such chunky size and a computed price of about $500 each, wouldn’t have been cost effective to sell.
Punch Cards
Punch cards had been developed straight after the demise of the Selectron tube but the fundamental principle has been used for mechanized textile looms in the textile industry as far back as 1725. Punch cards were also employed in organs and other instruments and in some voting machines.
A punch card, true to its name, is a card or stiff paper with holes or punches. Digital information is stored by the absence or presence of holes at predetermined positions.
Punched Tape
Similar to a punch card, the punched tape was an info storage device which is a roll of tape punched with holes. Its beginnings may also be traced to mechanized looms. Each row on the tape has different configurations of punched holes which correspond to a single character. This is often used both to input information into early PCs and also to output info.
Magnetic Drum Memory
This was literally a drum form of info storage device and wasn't in any means convenient. For all its size, it could only hold 10 kilobytes but was widely utilized in the 1950′s and 60′s as the main working memory of computers. Later on magnetic drum memories of only 16 inches in length were made.
Hard Drive
The first ever hard drive was the IBM Model 350 Disk File which came with the IBM computer in 1956. It was also big as it contained 50 pieces of 24-inch storage discs which all together can hold about 5 million characters or only 5 MB. The first drive which could store 2 GB was developed in the 1980′s but came in the size of a refrigerator and at a restricting price of $80,000 to $140,000.
After these early sorts of info storage media came what we now recognise in our current generation: the laser disc, the cassette tape and the floppy disks. Definitely, the history of info storage has come a great distance and the science behind it shows no signs of slowing down yet.
Jason Sloan runs a data recovery business called Kingdom Data Recovery Scotland who service all the UK. He has got many articles on his site which refer to issues with storage and helpful info about stopping data loss.