A Brief History of Data Storage
summary
A brisk tour traces physical media from clay tablets and punch‑card Jacquard looms to 1890s Hollerith cards (80 columns) and 1957 hard disks (3.7 MB), through drum and core rope memory (read‑only ROM used on Apollo), floppies and CDs (phase‑change alloy needs ~200°C to reset), magnetic tape cold archives (Viking 1976 tapes became unreadable until formats were reverse‑engineered), modern SSD wear‑leveling and 20–26 TB HDDs, and speculative stores like 5D optical storage and DNA for extreme longevity.
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chapters (18)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:37What is data storage
- 3:30Old stuff that has survived
- 19:45Floppy disks
- 20:34Optical drives
- 24:58Cassette Tapes
- 25:46Magnetic Tapes
- 26:54Viking Mars Lander
- 27:54Spinning Discs
- 28:33IBM Hard Drives
- 29:21Super Paramagnetism
- 30:18Data Bunker
- 31:40Flash Memory
- 34:27DNA
- 36:375D Optical
- 39:01Time Crystals
- 43:32Summary
- 51:47Kifu
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