Grandfather Floppy Disk 👴 

I guarantee almost everyone who is reading this has heard of the floppy disk technology at least once in their lives! The floppy disk has been around for a long time and was the main use of storage for computers mainly from the 1970s up to the late 1990s. Many companies at the time of the roll out of floppy disks were still relying on punch cards as their primary method for data entry, so IBM made it easier for companies by adapting their computers to reliably write data to disks.

The innovative way in which the floppy disk operates is that it uses magnetic material coated onto a Mylar disk along with a spindle in the middle for the drive heads to be able to read and write information onto the disk magnetically. The drive heads are very small to be able to fit into a envelope and also featured a debris cleaning feature as they got dirty easily.

This was not only a medium for data storage but made being able to write and transfer data way easier as computers could now just easily eject the disk when the person was done and that person could now take and transfer that disk to another computer! Remarkedly, the use of this technology peaked during the mid-1990s 20 years after the starting stages of them being implemented into society!

Breakthrough Of The CD-Rom

The floppy disk may have been a very widespread technology but that wouldn’t stop the advancement and improved capabilities of the classic CD! The CD-ROM technology had came about in 1982 by Sony and Philips as it was used for digital audio production but then as the capabilities of the CD were recognized they became widely adopted as the better alternative to floppy disks.

The CD or compact disc held 680 megabytes over the floppy disk’s 1.4 megabyte storage which quickly ramped up the use of the CD-ROM technology. CD-ROM works by using a low-power laser beam in the drive to read the etched pits on the CD as binary data. The only fallback to the CD-ROM tech was that it was read-only so only data could read from the disc. This quickly led to the invention of the CD-R or CD-Recordable which allowed for spots to be “burned” chemically onto the organic dye layer of the disk that were read the same as the normal CD pits.

More adaptations came along for the CD as its size for storing data was just not enough for bigger groups of data like audio, graphics, and video. Sony then released the DVD or Digital Video Disc into the scene with its impressive storage capacity of 4.7 gigabytes. There was also the double-layer, double-sided DVD-ROM that had over 17 gigabytes worth of storage at the time. Blu-ray discs took their time to hit the scene coming out in 2005 but ultimately allowed for 25 gigabytes of storage on the single-layer disc and 50 gigabytes on their double-layer disc.

Flash Drives and Cloud

CDs would later become stomped by a newer technology that would lead the storm called USB or Universal Serial Bus. The USB flash drive which was unveiled in 2000 took the world by storm as it was an even smaller form of data storage than the CD that could easily be transported in your pocket! The first ones released would only hold 8 megabytes but this would only be the starting stages of the USB stick as later upgrades would allow for as much as 2 terabytes in 2023!

USB flash drives work using flash memory storage that is controlled by a small chip that is powered on when connected to the computer’s USB port. The USB drive’s drivers will automatically be installed when connecting to the computer as it powers up. USB flash drives are still widely used all around the world today and the technologies for it are still evolving, but let’s take a look at something that could wipe out the means for data to be carried around in physical terms, the cloud!

The cloud is not some mythical place where data is stored but is actually a whole network of servers working together to provide many resources like data storage to anyone with access to the internet. Companies could now use Cloud computing to store the large amounts of data that their servers couldn’t originally handle. This removes the need to carry any data on you as a physical device as you can now just upload it to the cloud and access it through there at any time it’s needed! Cloud computing was majorly kickstarted by Amazon during the early 2010s and they continue to be the industry leaders however Microsoft is rising just as fast with their Cloud platform!