In 1956, 5MB is needed to be escorted through the plane and is actually big enough to fit a plane. Now, I could hold a 1GB in the palm of my hand. How did we become so high tech that we don’t even need our storage to be the size of a kid’s homemade castle box?
In: 13
Each bit of data on a hard drive has to be stored in a physical medium. It started out using cards with large holes in that the computer work punch out to start data. These punch cards where also used by programmers to interact with the machine, as a bunch of the basic interface technologies we every day hadn’t been invented yet. A big improvement was the switch to magnetic such as cassette tapes. In those devices, data is stored in a slice of a magnetic medium with a read/write head being able to read and write data into the medium using magnetic fields. The primary restriction of these devices is the size of the size of the read/write head and how fast you can spin the device and still have the read/write head be able to function properly. Do so required both faster control software and smaller & more precise electronics to do the work, which are both primarily limited by the size of the transistors, the fundamental building block used to make computers. Prior to the invention of transistors, vacuum tubes were used to build computers and they were rough the size of light bulbs. Transistors started out fairly big, but they have shrunk is same amazing fast, with the smallest of modern transistors being literally tens of atoms thick at this point. This is why they are able to use specially designed transistors as the storage medium in SSDs.
Latest Answers