A Brief History of Data Storage
summary
Survey of storage traces cuneiform clay tablets with a 1750 BCE complaint recovered only after accidental firing, punch‑card looms leading to Hollerith’s 1890 census tabulators and the IBM legacy with 80 columns still shaping terminal widths, magnetic cores and core dump persistence used on Apollo, floppy and hard disks evolving from 3.75 MB cabinets to multi‑terabyte drives, commercial tape for cold storage, experimental DNA on the Moon claims for billion‑year retention, and laser‑engraved 5D optical glass plus speculative time‑crystal quantum memory.
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chapters (19)
- 0:00Data storage history
- 1:57Defining data storage
- 5:29Ancient data storage methods
- 10:00Textiles and punch cards
- 14:35Film photography storage
- 17:24Vinyl records storage
- 19:12Punch cards in computing
- 20:56Magnetic storage and drum memory
- 22:41Magnetic core memory
- 25:30Core rope memory
- 26:58Floppy discs legacy
- 31:56Optical storage tech
- 36:33Magnetic tapes in data centers
- 41:06Hard drive limitations
- 44:12Flash memory durability
- 46:21Future: DNA storage
- 50:575D optical storage
- 53:44Time crystals and quantum memory
- 57:20Summary
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