Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

(original title: past Life and present Life of Storage Technology (part I))

Introduction: Hello, everyone. I am Mr. Xiaozao. In today's article, let's talk about storage.

When it comes to storage, everyone thinks of hard drives.

▲ hard disk

In fact, storage is not only a micro concept, but also a macro concept.

Microscopically, it refers to data storage, computer storage and hard disk storage. Macroscopically, the storage and preservation of all items and information can be called storage.

The development history of human civilization is actually based on the evolution of storage technology.

In ancient times, early human beings kindled the fire of human civilization through knotting ropes and tortoise shell bones.

Later, with the progress of technology, there are bamboo slips, paper slips, paper and silk, people can better record information (history, culture and skills), so as to continue and pass on civilization.

In the 18th century, the industrial revolution began to sprout, which pushed human information storage technology to a new stage-the era of punching cards.

█ punch card era in 1725, the Frenchman Basler Bucho (Basile Bouchon) invented punch card (punch card), used in looms.

▲ punch card loom (model)

You may be a little strange to this thing. It's a bit like the answer card we use for exams now.

In the knitting process of the loom, the knitting needle will slide back and forth. According to the small hole in the punch card, the knitting needle can draw the warp thread (if there is no hole, no hook), thus drawing the pattern. In other words, a punch card is a memory that stores a "pattern program" to control the loom.

This invention marks the beginning of the form of human mechanized information storage.

In 1801, the French loom craftsman Joseph Marier Joseph Marie Jdakacquard upgraded the punch card.

He bundled the punch cards in a certain order into ribbons, creating a prototype of punched paper tape (Punched Tape). This kind of paper tape is used in jacquard looms.

In 1846, Alexander Bain (Alexander Bain), the inventor of the fax machine and telex machine, introduced perforated paper tape technology into his Telegraph machine, which greatly improved work efficiency.

▲ was seen with his own eyes many years ago (exposed his age).

By 1890, the appearance of a great man made the punch-in technology further carry forward. This man is a German-American, Herman Holly (Herman Hollerith).

▲ Herman Holleri (1860-1929)

On the basis of punch cards, this man invented the punch card tabulator, which is specially used to collect and count census data.

▲ punch card tabulator

The statistical speed of this kind of watchmaker is faster. According to historical records, in the 1890 American census, the statistical work was completed in just six weeks through punching film and punching machines. In the previous 1880 U. S. census, the data were processed by hand and took seven years to get the final results.

With such a huge improvement in efficiency, watchmaking machines are rapidly popularized in various industries. It marks the beginning of the era of semi-automatic data processing system.

▲ punch card technology was still widely used until the 1960s.

Later, in 1896, Herman Holly founded the watchmaking Machine Company (Tabulating Machine Company). This company is the predecessor of the famous IBM company.

In the era of █ magnetic storage, punch cards and tabulators belong to mechanical storage technology. Although they have a great improvement in efficiency compared with traditional manpower, they still have the problems of high failure rate and low storage capacity.

Therefore, driven by the electrical signal technology in the 19th century, a new type of storage technology began to rise gradually, that is, magnetic media storage.

The earliest articles on magnetic media were published in the British magazine Electrical World on September 8, 1888. In the article "some possible forms of phonograph", the author Oberlin Smith Smith published the earliest views on magnetic recording, he suggested: "use magnetic media to record sound."

▲ Oberlin Smith (1840-1926)

In 1898, Danish engineer Vatima Paulson (Valdemar Poulsen) put Oberlin Smith's idea into practice.

He used magnetic wire technology in his Telegraph for the first time, making it the first practical magnetoacoustic recording and reproducing equipment for human beings.

▲ Vatima Paulson's magnetic wire Telegraph

The working principle of this magnetic recording device is not complicated: the device has a magnetic head, and the electrical signal of the sound is transmitted to the magnetic head, which produces a magnetization mode similar to the signal and is recorded. When reading, the head takes changes in the magnetic field from the magnetic wire and converts them into electrical signals.

In 1928, German engineer Fritz Plummer (Fritz Pfleumer) invented the audio tape, which can store analog signals, marking the official beginning of the era of magnetic storage.

The working principle of the tape is also simple: the crushed magnetic particles are glued to the strip of paper to make a tape. As the tape moves, the degree of magnetization of the tape changes with the strength of the audio signal, thus recording sound.

Interestingly, the reason why the Germans made great efforts to promote the improvement of tape technology was to better spread Hitler's speech. Americans later actively introduced the technology in order to spread pop music.

In 1932, there was another major breakthrough in magnetic storage technology.

This year, Austrian engineer Gustav Tossek (Gustav Tauschek) invented the magnetic drum memory.

▲ drum memory

This memory is a bit like an electric motor. It contains a large metal cylinder with a ferromagnetic recording material coated on the outer surface.

On the inside of the memory housing, there are a large number of static heads. Instead of looking for data, these heads wait for the fan to rotate and read. As you can see, the magnetic line becomes the magnetic surface, which is more and more like the later disk.

At that time, Gustav Tossek's original drum memory had a capacity of about 500000bit (62.5KB).

After entering the 1940s, human electronic digital computer technology began to explode.

In 1942, Professor John Vincent Atanassov (John Vincent Atanasoff) of Iowa State College and his student Clifford Berry (Clifford Berry) invented the world's first electronic digital computer (previously mechanical computer)-ABC (Atanasoff-Berry Computer).

▲ ABC (replica)

ABC uses binary numbers to represent all numbers and data, uses electronic components for calculations (rather than mechanical switches), and separates calculations from memory. All of these, these are the elements of modern computers.

Many readers will surely ask: isn't the world's first digital computer ENIAC?

Actually, no, ENIAC can only be ranked 11th. Moreover, the designers of ENIAC stole the design of Atanasoff. In 1973, a US court ruled that ENIAC's patent had been revoked.

ABC uses IBM's 80-column punch card as input and output, and uses vacuum tubes to process data in binary format. Data storage is the use of regenerated capacitor magnetic drum memory (Regenerative Capacitor Memory).

After the first electronic computer, IEEE Edison Award winner Vannevar Bush, founder of the US science and technology management system, released a prophecy:

Humans will eventually invent machines that store books, records, communication, and all other human knowledge.

Besides magnetic storage, █ 's crooked science and technology tree expanded several other storage technology lines in the 1940s.

In 1946, Jan A. Rajchman, a talented Polish inventor, invented a selective electrostatic memory tube-Selectron Tube.

▲ Jan Alexander Lachman and his Selectron Tube

It is the first real digital random access high-speed memory (RAM). It uses electrostatic charge to store data in a vacuum tube and can store about 4000 bytes of data briefly.

In 1947, Freddie Williams (Freddie Williams) and Tom Tom Kilburn invented the Williams-Kilborn tube (Williams-Kilburn tube) with similar principle and put it into commercial use.

IBM's first commercial science computer, 701, used 72 of these tubes as memory.

Better known than the above two memories is the mercury (mercury) delay line memory (Delay Line Memory) invented by John Bishop Presper Eckert during World War II.

The principle of this delay line memory is to store data by using the propagation delay of pressure waves.

Take a tube and fill it with mercury. Put a speaker at one end of the tube and a microphone at the other end.

When the loudspeaker emits a pulse, it produces a pressure wave, which takes time to propagate to the microphone at the other end, which converts the pressure wave back to the electrical signal.

There is a pressure wave representing 1, not 0. Through the internal circuit, connect the microphone and the loudspeaker, and then through the amplifier to make up for the signal weakness, so as to achieve a cycle of storing data.

After developing the technology, Eckert and his colleague John Mauchly designed ENIAC. Later, they made a bigger and better computer called EDVAC.

▲ EDVAC (guess who this man is? )

EDVAC uses a total of 128 delay lines, each of which can store 352bit and a total of 45000bit, which is one of the earliest "stored program computers".

Delay line memory has a big disadvantage: only one bit of data can be read at a time, and it can only be read sequentially (so it is also called "sequential memory" or "circular memory").

As a result, delay line memory was basically out of date by the mid-1950s.

The rise of a new type of storage technology has realized the replacement of delay line memory, that is, "magnetic core memory" with higher performance, higher reliability and lower cost.

To put it bluntly, storage technology still goes back to the scientific and technological line of magnetic storage.

In 1947, American engineer Frederick Feer (Frederick Viehe) was the first to apply for a patent for core memory.

In 1948, the legendary Chinese scientist An Wang invented the "Pulse Transmission Control device (Pulse transfer controlling device)", which realized the Write-after-Read of the magnetic core memory. In 1949, An Wang applied for a patent and sold it to IBM for $500000.

You should have heard of this An Wang, the founder of the later legendary IT company An Wang computer.

In fact, the principle of magnetic core memory is similar to magnetic drum memory, which uses the change of magnetization when electrified to represent 0 and 1, so as to record data.

Winding the core with a wire and applying an electric current can magnetize the core in one direction. If the current is turned off, the core remains magnetized. If the current is applied in the opposite direction, the direction of magnetization (polarity) is reversed, which can be used to distinguish between storage 1 and 0.

▲ core memory

The first large-scale use of magnetic core memory was the Whirlwind 1 computer of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1953.

Later, Jay Forrester perfected the core storage technology and introduced the first reliable computer high-speed random access memory.

Magnetic core memory was widely used as the main memory of computers in the 1970s until Intel's semiconductor DRAM memory was mass produced.

It is worth mentioning that in 1951, magnetic tape was first used to store data on commercial computers and as the main I / O device on UNIVAC computers.

▲ UNIVAC

▲ UNIVAC Tape Drive

UNIVAC uses tape technology, which has attracted the attention of IBM.

Soon after, IBM invented a new tape mechanism that uses vacuum column isolation to ensure that tapes are not easily torn during acceleration or deceleration.

In 1952, IBM released a new tape storage device (model 726), which was sold with the IBM 701 computer.

█ 's belated hard drive era on September 14, 1956, a gigantic cabinet was displayed at a press conference by IBM.

This cabinet looks like an aquarium, about 2 meters high and weighs nearly 1 ton. Inside the cabinet, there is a layer of discs (diameter 61cm), a bit like stacked records.

What is this cabinet for?

The answer: it was the IBM 350 RAMAC, which came to be called the first hard drive in human history.

(the full name is very long, called Statistical Control Random access method, Random Access Method for Accounting Control. )

More precisely, the ▲ IBM 350 RAMAC is a commercial computer that uses a removable head hard drive (HDD).

The IBM 350 RAMAC has minimal storage space, with only 5MB. Its read and write rate is horribly low, only 97.6Kb / s.

However, such a "weak chicken" device, which sold for as much as $35400 (equivalent to more than $300,000 today), was not necessarily available.

As we all know now, the birth of IBM 350RAMAC is of far-reaching significance-it marks the beginning of the era of hard drives. With the rapid development of digital technology, another important jigsaw puzzle has been completed.

Since then, as the founder and leader of storage technology, IBM continues to lead the development of hard drives.

In 1962, IBM released the first removable hard drive 1311, which had six 14-inch disks that could store 2.6MB data.

▲ IBM1311, it looks a bit like a stove.

In 1973, IBM invented the Winchester (Winchester) hard disk 3340, which uses sealing components, lubricating spindles and small mass heads.

Its characteristic is that when working, the magnetic head is suspended above the high-speed rotating disk without direct contact with the disk, which is the prototype of the modern hard disk.

The reason why this hard drive is called "Winchester" is mainly because its two 30MB storage units happen to be the caliber and reload of the famous Winchester rifle at that time.

The ▲ Winchester architecture is already very similar to today's hard drives.

After the birth of "Winchester" disk drive, the basic architecture of modern hard disk has been established. Since then, the main development direction of the hard disk is the continuous increase in capacity and the continuous decrease in volume.

In other words, the architecture of the HDD hard drive you use today is not much different from that of 1973.

In 1980, IBM introduced the first GB-level storage hard disk. In the same year, an unknown small company invented a cheap hard drive and began to challenge the status of IBM.

The company was founded in 1979 by Seagate.

Seagate's hard drive model is ST-506. The disk size is 5.25in, much smaller than the 3340 of the IBM. This hard drive can store 5MB data and costs about $1500. Soon after, Seagate launched ST-412 with 10MB capacity.

▲ ST-412

In 1983, the Scottish company Rodime released the world's first 3.5-inch hard drive, which was equally significant.

The emergence of small-size hard disk not only lays the foundation for the birth of personal PC, but also creates conditions for the digitization of families and small and medium-sized enterprises.

Everyone knows that there is a Moore's law in the field of semiconductors. In fact, the hard disk also has its own law, that is-the capacity density of the hard disk increases about twice as much every year.

In the 1990s, Nobel laureates Albert Fert and Peter Grunberg discovered the giant magnetoresistance effect.

Based on this effect, the GMR giant magnetoresistive effect head technology and SMR corrugated stacked disk technology have successfully increased the track density of the mechanical hard disk by hundreds of times.

In 2007, Hitachi (acquired IBM hard disk Division in 2003) was the first to launch TB-level hard drives, which is an important milestone in storage technology.

The hard disk adopts vertical storage technology, which changes the direction of the magnetic field parallel to the disk to vertical, which makes full use of the storage space. In addition, the vertical storage technology has the advantages of low energy consumption and low calorific value, which improves the ability of data to resist thermal degradation and improves the reliability of the hard disk.

In 2010, helium packaging technology mass production, in addition to increasing the capacity of the hard disk, temperature and power consumption can be further reduced, durability and stability have been greatly improved.

At the beginning of 2022, Seagate confirmed that it would launch a mechanical hard drive with 22TB capacity (using stacked tiles), which is expected to set a new record for the maximum single disk capacity of a mechanical hard disk.

█ floppy disk and CD next, let's talk about floppy disk and CD briefly.

The world's first floppy disk, also from IBM, was born in 1971. At that time, the floppy disk was 8 inches in diameter and had a capacity of 80KB, which was read-only and not writable. Four years later, a read-write floppy disk was born, and the capacity was increased to 256KB.

Later, with the development of technology, 5.25-inch floppy disks were born and widely used in Apple II, IBM PC and other compatible computers.

In 1980, Sony of Japan developed a 3.5-inch floppy disk and became the market standard. In 1984, Apple began to use 3.5-inch floppy disks on the Mac. At that time, the capacity of floppy disks was less than that of 1MB. Later, the 1.44MB floppy disk became the mainstream of the market.

▲ in 2005, when Xiaozaojun was still in college, he used this kind of floppy disk, which was easily damaged.

Later, the floppy disk has the highest capacity of 250MB. However, with the emergence of CD-ROMs and U-disks, floppy disks quickly disappeared from the market.

And look at the CD.

Compared with floppy disks, the life of optical discs is much longer.

Russell Russell, an American physicist, invented the first Compact Disk / CD (digital-optical recording and playback system) in 1965 and filed a patent application in 1966, which was the predecessor of CD / DVD.

In 1982, Sony and Philips released the world's first commercial CD audio player, CDP-101, and CD-ROMs became popular. The maximum capacity of ordinary standard 120 optical discs can reach 700MB.

DVD was originally an acronym for Digital Video Disc (Digital Video Disc). In 1995, IBM took the lead in unifying the high-capacity optical disc standard into DVD, which was redefined as Digital Versatile Disc (Digital Multi-purpose CD). At that time, the capacity of DVD could reach 4.7GB.

After the launch of the Blu-ray DVD, each disc has a capacity of up to 25G or 27GB. If you use multiple layers, you can achieve an amazing 400GB (16 layers).

Optical discs actually work not by using magnetism, but by engraving pits-there are many small pits on the surface of the disc, causing different reflections of light, which are captured by optical sensors and decoded into 1s and zeros.

After entering the 21st century, █ conclusion, information technology develops at an explosive speed.

With the popularity of the Internet and the rise of mobile phones, the digitization of the whole society has been greatly accelerated. The resulting data growth is also staggering.

Although the traditional HDD hard disk is constantly improving its capacity and performance, it is still unable to meet the needs of the times.

As a result, a new type of storage technology rises rapidly and begins to replace HDD. This technology is semiconductor storage.

What on earth is semiconductor storage? DRAM, FLASH, NAND, SSD that you often hear. What exactly does it mean?

Stay tuned for the following episode:

The past Life and present Life of Storage Technology (part two): the strongest introduction to Semiconductor Storage

All right, thank you for your patience. I'll see you next time!

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