The first PCs used paper tape and Data
cassette recorder the same kind that you
listen to music with, using a data
cassette for storage was very slow.
Removable floppy disks as storage
devices did not become popular before
1978 when Apple introduced the disk II.
The term "floppy" accurately fit the
earliest 8-inch PC diskettes and the
5.25-inch diskettes that succeeded them.
The inner disk that holds the data
usually is made of mylar and coated with
a magnetic oxide, and the outer, plastic
cover, bends easily. The inner disk of
today's smaller, 3.5-inch floppies are
similarly constructed, but they are
housed in a rigid plastic case, which is
much more durable than the flexible
covering on the larger diskettes.
The mid-1800's, punch cards are used to
provide input to early calculators and
other machines.
1940 is the decade when vacuum tubes
were used for storage.
1950 finally, tape drives started to
replace punch cards. Only a couple of
years later, magnetic drums appeared on
the scene.
1956, the first hard drive the IBM 305
RAMAC is the first magnetic hard disk
for data storage, and the RAMAC (Random
Access Method of Accounting and Control)
technology soon becomes the industry
standard. It required 50 24-inch disks
to store five megabytes (million bytes,
abbreviated MB) of data and cost roughly
$35,000 a year to lease - or $7,000 per
megabyte per year. For years, hard disk
drives were confined to mainframe and
minicomputer installations. Vast "disk
farms" of giant 14- and 8-inch drives
costing tens of thousands of dollars
each whirred away in the air conditioned
isolation of corporate data centers.
1962 - JUN. Teletype ships its Model 33
keyboard and punched-tape terminal, used
for input and output on many early
microcomputers.
1967 - IBM builds the first floppy disk.
1971 - IBM introduces the "memory disk",
or "floppy disk", an 8-inch floppy
plastic disk coated with iron oxide.
1973 - IBM introduces the IBM 3340 hard
disk unit, known as the Winchester,
IBM's internal development code name.
The recording head rides on a layer of
air 18 millionths of an inch thick.
1976 - AUG. iCOM advertises their
"Frugal Floppy" in BYTE magazine, an
8-inch floppy drive, selling for
US$1200.
1976 - AUG. Shugart announces its 5.25
inch "minifloppy" disk drive for US$390.
1977 - DEC. At an executive board
meeting at Apple Computer, president
Mike Markkula lists the floppy disk
drive as the company's top goal.
1978 - JUN. Apple Computer introduces
the Disk II, a 5.25 inch floppy disk
drive linked to the Apple II by cable.
Price: US$495, including controller
card.
The 1980's The introduction of the first
small hard disk drives. The first
5.25-inch hard disk drives packed 5 to
10 MB of storage - the equivalent of
2,500 to 5,000 pages of double-spaced
typed information - into a device the
size of a small shoe box. At the time, a
storage capacity of 10 MB was considered
too large for a so-called "personal"
computer.
1980 - Sony Electronics introduces the
3.5 inch floppy disk drive,
double-sided, double-density, holding up
to 875KB unformatted.
1980 - JUN. Seagate Technologies
announces the first Winchester 5.25-inch
hard disk drive.
1980 - JUN. Shugart begins selling
Winchester hard-disk drives.
1982 - JUN. Sony Electronics
demonstrates its 3.5 inch microfloppy
disk system.
1982 - SEP. Iomega begins production of
the Alpha 10, a 10MB 8-inch floppy-disk
drive using Bernoulli technology
1982 - NOV. Drivetec announces the
Drivetec 320 Superminifloppy, offering
3.33MB unformatted capacity on a
5.25-inch drive.
1982 - DEC. Tabor demonstrates a
3.25-inch floppy disk drive, the Model
TC500 Drivette. Unformatted capacity is
up to 500KB on a single side.
1982 - DEC. Amdek releases the Amdisk-3
Micro-Floppy-disk Cartridge system. It
houses two 3-inch floppy drives designed
by Hitachi/Matsushita/Maxell. Price is
US$800, without a controller card.
1982 - At the West Coast Computer Faire,
Davong Systems introduces its 5MB
Winchester Disk Drive for the IBM PC,
for US$2000.
1983 - MAY. Sony Electronics announces
the 3.5 inch floppy disk and drive,
double-sided, double-density, holding up
to 1MB.
1983 With the introduction of the IBM
PC/XT hard disk drives also became a
standard component of most personal
computers. The descriptor "hard" is used
because the inner disks that hold data
in a hard drive are made of a rigid
aluminum alloy. These disks, called
platters, are coated with a much
improved magnetic material and last much
longer than a plastic, floppy diskette.
The longer life of a hard drive is also
a function of the disk drive's
read/write head: in a hard disk drive,
the heads do not contact the storage
media, whereas in a floppy drive, the
read/write head does contact the media,
causing wear.
1983 - Philips and Sony develop the
CD-ROM, as an extension of audio CD
technology.
1984 - MAY - Apple Computer introduces
the DuoDisk dual 5.25-inch floppy disk
drive unit for the Apple II line.
By the mid-1980's, 5.25-inch form factor
hard drives had shrunk considerably in
terms of height. A standard hard drive
measured about three inches high and
weighed only a few pounds, while lower
capacity "half-height" hard drives
measured only 1.6 inches high.
1985 - JUN. Apple Computer introduces
the UniDisk 5.25 single 5.25-inch floppy
disk drive, with the ability to
daisy-chain additional drives through
it.
By 1987, 3.5-inch form factor hard
drives began to appear. These compact
units weigh as little as a pound and are
about the size of a paperback book. They
were first integrated into desktop
computers and later incorporated into
the first truly portable computers -
laptops weighing under 12 pounds. The
3.5-inch form factor hard drives quickly
became the standard for desktop and
portable systems requiring less than 500
MB capacity. Height also kept shrinking
with the introduction of one-inch high,
'low-profile' drives.
1987 - SEP. Microsoft ships Microsoft
Bookshelf, its first CD-ROM application.
1990 - JAN. Commodore gives a sneak
preview of a proposed "interactive
graphics player", based on a variant of
the Amiga 500, with 1MB of RAM. The
machine includes an integrated CD-ROM
drive, but no keyboard.
1990 - NOV. The Multimedia PC Marketing
Council sets the minimum configuration
required of a PC to run MPC-class
software: 10-MHz 286 processor, 2MB RAM,
30MB hard drive, 16-color VGA, mouse,
8-bit audio card, 150KBps CD-ROM drive.
1991 - JAN. Commodore releases the CDTV
(Commodore Dynamic Total Vision)
package. It features a CD-ROM player
integrated with a 7.16-MHz 68000-based
Amiga 500. List price is US$1000.
1991 - JUN. Tandy introduces its
low-cost CDR-1000 CD-ROM drive for PCs.
At US$400, including drive and
controller card, it is about half the
price of other drives.
1991 - OCT. Insite Technology begins
shipping its 21 MB 3.5-inch floppy disk
drive to system vendors. The drive uses
"floptical" disks, using optical
technology to store data.
By 1992, a number of 1.8-inch form
factor hard drives appeared, weighing
only a few ounces and delivering
capacities up to 40 MB. Even a 1.3-inch
hard drive, about the size of a
matchbox, was introduced. Of course,
smaller form factors in and of
themselves are not necessarily better
than larger ones. Hard disk drives with
form factors of 2.5 inches and less
currently are required only by computer
applications where light weight and
compactness are key criteria. Where
capacity and cost-per-megabyte are the
leading criteria, larger form factor
hard drives are still the preferred
choice. For this reason, 3.5-inch hard
drives will continue to dominate for the
foreseeable future in desktop PCs and
workstations, while 2.5-inch hard drives
will continue to dominate in portable
computers.
1993 - OCT. NEC Technologies unveils the
first triple-speed (450KBps) CD-ROM
drive.
1994 - JAN. NEC Technologies ships its
quad-speed CD-ROM, priced at US$1000.
1994 - DEC. Iomega Corp. introduces its
Zip drive and Zip disks, floppy disk
sized removable storage in sizes of 25MB
or 100MB.
Since its introduction, the hard disk
drive has become the most common form of
mass storage for personal computers.
Manufacturers have made immense strides
in drive capacity, size, and
performance. Today, 3.5-inch, gigabyte
(GB) drives capable of storing and
accessing one billion bytes of data are
commonplace in workstations running
multimedia, high-end graphics,
networking, and communications
applications. And, palm-sized drives not
only store the equivalent of hundreds of
thousands of pages of information, but
also retrieve a selected item from all
this data in just a few thousandths of a
second. What's more, a disk drive does
all of this very inexpensively. By the
early 1990s, the cost of purchasing a
200 MB hard disk drive had dropped below
$200, or less than one dollar per
megabyte.
1997 - NOV. IBM announced the world's
highest capacity desktop PC hard disk
drive with new breakthrough technology
called Giant Magnetoresistive (GMR)
heads. Pioneered by scientists at IBM
Research, GMR heads will be used in
IBM's Deskstar 16GP, a 16.8-gigabyte
drive. This brings down the cost of
storage to .25 cents per megabyte.
1998 - NOV. IBM announced a 25GB hard
drive. That first hard disk drive in
1956 had a capacity of 5 megabytes.
IBM's Deskstar 25GP 25-gigabyte (GB)
drive has 5,000 times the capacity of
that first drive. It holds either the
double-spaced typed text on a stack of
paper more than 4,000 feet high, more
than six full-length feature films or
20,000 digital images.
1999 - October 18, IBM raised the bar in
hard drive technology with a new family
of record-breaking hard drives and a new
technology that protects drives against
temperature variation and vibration. The
10,000 RPM Ultrastar 72ZX -- the world's
highest capacity drive at 73 gigabytes
(GB).
2000 - Paris, FRANCE - June 20, 2000.
IBM® announced the availability of the
1Gb Microdrive, the world's smallest,
lightest and largest capacity mobile
hard disk increasing storage by a factor
of three
