how the physical storage for computers got smaller over time

Question

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

Answer 1

Before the tapes and disks we used magnetic core memory. These actually used ferrite toroid cores as memory. Each ring was like a little transformer which you saturated to store a 1 or 0. These types of devices maxed out at around 32 kilobits per cubic foot.