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Podcast Transcript

If you have used a computer, which I’m assuming is almost everyone listening to this, you have probably had to store your data somewhere. 

You might have used a USB drive, a hard drive, or if you are old enough, maybe even a floppy drive.

These types of data storage are just the latest in a long line of methods to store information that goes back a surprising amount of time. 

Learn more about this history of data storage and how it goes back farther than you might realize on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. 

The topic of this episode is data storage, and I should be very clear about what I am and am not going to be talking about.

I am not going to be talking about writing. I’ve covered the history of writing and books in several previous episodes. While text and writing do qualify as data, this isn’t the focus of this episode. 

Likewise, also I’m not going to be covering Random Access Memory, or RAM, which is found in computers. This is data storage, but it is short-term memory that disappears once the computer is turned off. I’m going to be focusing on data that can be stored long-term. 

With that, most people assume that data storage began with the advent of computers. 

That is false. Data storage, the forerunners of what would eventually become computer storage, actually began back in the 18th century, well before the development of computers or even electricity. 

The origin can be found in the year 1725. 

Basile Bouchon was a French textile worker and inventor who made a significant contribution to the automation of the textile industry by developing an early form of the programmable loom. 

His invention used a perforated paper tape to control the weaving pattern, allowing for the complex designs in textiles. 

The tape guided a loom operator, allowing them to consistently create the same weave on the cloth that they were making. This served really more as a guide for the operator, but the paper tape did store data about the wave pattern on it. 

It was a very crude beginning, but Bouchon’s invention laid the foundation for what was to come.

Another French weaver, Joseph Marie Jacquard, made the next big advancement in 1801, developing what became known as the Jacquard Loom. 

The Jacquard loom was a mechanical loom that revolutionized the textile industry by introducing a method to automatically control the weaving of complex patterns. The loom used a series of punch cards to control the movement of the loom’s heddles, which in turn lifted and lowered the warp threads to create intricate patterns.

The Jacquard loom differed from Bouchon’s earlier invention in that it used punch cards instead of paper tape and was designed to be read by a machine rather than used as a guide for a loom operator. 

The loom uses a series of punch cards, each representing one row of the design. Holes in the cards correspond to positions where a warp thread should be lifted. Here, I’ll refer you back to my episode on cloth and textiles. 

Where there is a hole in the punch card, a pin passes through, allowing a corresponding hook to remain engaged. Where there is no hole, the pin pushes the hook away.

The idea of punch cards as a system for storing data for machines caught on after the Jacquard loom. 

Charles Babbage, who proposed the first mechanical computing device,  and who I covered in a previous episode, proposed the use of punch cards to store information. 

In 1884, Herman Hollerith, an American statistician, patented a punched card system to process data for the 1890 U.S. Census. His method used punch cards to store data that could be read and tabulated by machines, significantly speeding up data processing.

Again, this was not digital data. The information being store wasn’t binary 1’s and 0’s, as we know it, but it certainly was data. One sport on a card might indicate if a person was married or single, for example.

Hollerith, developed the first keypunch machine, to put holes in punch cards as well as the first card feed mechanism.

In 1896, he founded the Tabulating Machine Company, which instituted a host of innovations with respect to card reading and manipulation. 

In 1911, his company and three other competitors joined together to form a new, larger company known as Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. 

The president of the company was Thomas J. Watson, and in 1924 it was renamed the International Business Machines Corporation, or more commonly known as IBM.

IBM became the leader in business machines, and punch cards became the method of storing data.

By 1937, IBM was producing five to ten million punch cards per day. 

During the Second World War, work on decrypting the Nazi enigma machines resulted in Bletchley Park going through two million punch cards a week. 

These machines were electronic, but they were not computers as we might think of them today.

When early computers were developed, punch cards were a natural choice for data storage. The first general-purpose digital computer, ENIAC, built in 1945, used punch cards as the input and output mechanism. 

The problems with punch cards were obvious. They took up a lot of space and were slow to read and write data. 

A solution to the problems of data storage was a technology developed in Austria by Gustav Tauschek in 1932: Magnetic Drum Memory.

It consisted of a cylindrical drum coated with a ferromagnetic material. Data was stored on the drum in the form of magnetic patterns, which could be read and written by read/write heads.

Positioned along the length of the drum, each track had its own dedicated read/write head. These heads were fixed in place and did not move, unlike the heads in modern hard disk drives.

Data was written to the drum by changing the magnetic orientation of the material on the surface. A write head would apply a magnetic field to a spot on the drum, aligning the magnetic domains in one direction to represent a binary ‘1’ or in the opposite direction for a binary ‘0.’

Magnetic Drum Memory was a common method of storing data for computers in the 1950s and 1960s. During this time, punch cards didn’t die out. In fact, they increased in popularity due to the increased use of computers. 

However, magnetic drum memory could be improved. When the world’s first mass-produced computer, the IBM 650, shipped in 1954, it had drum storage that held 17.5 kilobytes of data. To put that into perspective, it would hold less than one second of audio of an average episode of this podcast. 

Drums were not an ideal form for a magnetic medium. Another magnetic-based system was one that had been popularized for audio recording, magnetic tapes. 

If you see any movie showing a computer from the late 1950s and 1960s, they will often be running magnetic tapes in the background. 

IBM’s magnetic tape system became the standard, and it wasn’t that different from magnetic audio tapes. The tapes were a half inch or 12.7 mm wide and wound on open removable reels.

In the early 1950s, the first UNIVAC computers had tape storage of about 1.1 megabytes. 

By the early 1970s, a 9-track 2400-foot reel from IBM  could store 140 Megabytes of data. 

Tapes, too, had a big problem, primarily because they were linear. If you had a tape that was 2400 feet long, you had to go through the entire tape to get to something at the end. 

What was needed was a means of magnetic storage where you could arbitrarily access any part of the stored data. Instead of a drum or a tape, the ideal form was a disk. 

IBM introduced hard disk drives in 1956. The first hard disk drive was the IBM 350 disk storage unit.  The 350 was the size of multiple large filing cabinets and could store a whopping 3.75 MB of data. 

They became popular for many applications because they allowed for random access to data, which couldn’t be done with tapes. 

All of these storage formats that I’ve mentioned co-existed with each other through the 1960s. Punch cards eventually lost out to magnetic tapes and disks in the 1970s

They were all used for large corporate computers because that was the only thing that existed. These storage systems were large and very expensive.

In the late 1960s, the random access elements of a disk were put into a removable format known as a floppy disk. Not surprisingly, IBM developed the first floppy disks. 

The first floppy disks were sold to the public in 1972, and they were 8” in diameter, much larger than disks you are probably familiar with. Although originally called the Type 1 Diskette, the term floppy was used almost immediately. 

In 1976, a company known as Shugart Associates introduced the 5¼-inch disk, which became the standard format.

With the advent of personal computers in the 1980s, these large mainframe tape systems wouldn’t work. They were too bulky and too expensive to be used in the home. 

The floppy disk worked perfectly with smaller personal computers. Double-sided disks and higher-density disks were eventually introduced. 

In 1981, a team at Sony developed the 3½-inch floppy disk. Unlike the 5¼-inch disk, which was actually sort of floppy, the 3½-inch was encased in a hard plastic container, but it was still called a floppy disk. 

The most popular version of this disk, which became a standard for almost every personal computer, could hold 1.44 megabytes of data. 

Hard disk drives also improved their storage density and size, but they weren’t a part of the first generation of personal computers. It would be several years before hard drives became standard. 

I remember seeing my first hard drive during my freshman year of college. The guy who lived next door to me had a 10-megabyte hard drive for his Apple IIe, and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. 

As computers became more powerful, computer programs became larger, and by the early to mid-1990s, they outstripped the size of the floppy disk. 

As this was before broadband internet, almost all software sales were done with physical media. 

The solution was to use the media format, which was originally designed for audio: compact discs. 

The first format was known as CD-ROM, which stood for read-only memory. Unlike floppy disks, CD-ROMs can only be read, and nothing can be written to them. 

I’m going to end the story of data storage here because while there have been continual advancements, particularly optical storage, those will b for a future episode due to time constraints. 

I want to end by noting how so many of these data storage formats that I’ve mentioned have never totally gone obsolete. There are always a few systems somewhere in the world that just never get updated and continue to use antiquated data storage decades after everyone assumes it’s gone.

While punch cards mostly disappeared in the 1970s, there were some voting systems that used punch cards into the early 2000s.

Floppy disks still haven’t been rendered totally extinct despite the fact that it has been years since computers have been made with floppy drives. 

Sony was the last manufacturer of 3½-inch floppy disks. They ceased production in March 2011. 

There is currently only one company that sells the remaining supply of floppy disks: floppydisk.com. Tom Persky, the owner of the company, purchased the remaining supply when production ceased, and he has slowly been selling the remaining stock over the last 13 years. 

They are down to just a few hundred thousand disks, and he estimates that the rest of the supply will be exhausted by the next year or two. 

Eventually, all of the people who still use 3½-inch floppy disks because they never upgraded their computers are eventually going to have to do something when the last remaining disks are exhausted. 

As shocking as people still using 3.5-inch floppy disks might be, there are some systems out there that are even older….and i”m not talking about five and a quarter inch disks even. 

The United States Air Force was using the really old 8-inch floppy drives to manage its nuclear arsenal up until 2019. 

Likewise, magnetic tape drives are still alive and well. In 2000, a new tape format called Linear Tape-Open or LTO was introduced. LTO is not an obsolete format. It has been upgraded several times, and the current format, known as LTO-9, can hold 18 TB of data in one tape cartridge.

These tape drives are primarily used for backing up and archiving data. 

Hard drives, of course, are still around, even if they, too, are becoming more and more rare in computers. Most new computers have SSD drives, which stand for solid-state drives. They are faster than traditional magnetic hard drives and have become competitive in size.

However, much of what you do online is all being hosted somewhere in a server farm on banks of magnetic hard drives. 

As I mentioned at the top of the episode, the earliest origins of data storage date back to the 18th century. If the legacy systems that still use floppy drives are any indication, there is probably still some textile mill out there using punch cards for their Jacquard loom.

The Executive Producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. 

The associate producers are Ben Long and Cameron Kieffer. 

I have a correction to make. In my episode on home-field advantage, I said that Seattle’s Lumen Field, home to the Seattle Seahawks, had the loudest fan volume ever recorded. 

Many people brought it to my attention that that record was beaten by the crowd at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, which reached a peak volume in 2014 of 142.2 decibels.

As the Chiefs have won the last two Super Bowls, maybe there is something to the volume of the fans. 

Remember that if you leave a review or send me a boostagram, you too can have it read on the show.