Happy Birthday to the Hard Drive - Stone Knives and Bearskins?
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Even tape was an improvement over what came before. What was the first storage medium for computers? Would you believe paper? Most of the programmers who actively used this media are approaching early retirement age (and many of them are still programming). Users worked at a punch station to put holes in punch tape or punch cards. The holes and solid areas were read by the computer as ones and zeros.
The disadvantages of this media should be obvious. For openers, you couldn't try out the program until you were done, so you had to be very good at visualization. If you made a mistake, you had to repunch a whole lot of cards. Naturally, the cards had to be fed into the reader in a certain sequence, so heaven help you if you dropped your deck...or made the operator who ran your deck mad enough to shuffle it! Plus many card readers had a habit of jamming, often damaging the cards in the process...which then had to be repunched.
Given this context, tape drives were a vast improvement. When you think "tape drive" in this era, though, don't imagine a cassette tape. The magnetic tape used was actually rolled on something that looked as if it came off an old reel-to-reel recorder. To its credit, tape storage has lasted a very long time, and is even used in some businesses today for offline or secondary storage. When they were used as primary storage, though they were better than paper, they had to be read linearly. Those of you who have ever tried to play a particular song on a music cassette while skipping over the rest of the songs understand that disadvantage very well; tape is lousy if you need to search for something.
Despite IBM's 30/30 Winchester being available by 1973, many computers didn't use it right away. It wasn't until around 1980, when the first 5.25" hard drives came out (again, with a 5 MB capacity) that we began to see a PC revolution. Even then, many computers didn't have a hard drive. The 1980 Apple ][ had neither a hard disk drive nor a floppy drive in its original configuration. You could load programs onto it from an audio cassette tape, however.
Next: The Effects of Storage Increases and Kryder's Law >>
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