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

Recently, when the editor was preparing to move, he was packing his bags and found DVD and the pop song CD at the bottom of the bookshelf. He suddenly flashed through the joy of being immersed in the game at that time and the joy of saving pocket money to buy idol albums.

Some people say that "most technology products are destined to open only for a short period of time." Today we are going to talk about the evolutionary history of storage devices in the era of science and technology. Which of the following devices do you know or still exist?

Note: the storage devices discussed in this paper refer to computers, digital products, intelligent terminals and storage devices related to digital devices.

Once the "high-tech" experienced the changes of storage media such as knot notes, oracle bones, stone tablets, paper and so on. The rise of the industrial revolution has also brought about the evolution of storage devices. The following will introduce the mechanical storage devices produced from the industrial age. In addition, there are various kinds of equipment such as Williams tube (1946), mercury delay line (1947), counting tube (1953) and so on, which are not mentioned in this article because of their high price, uncommon use, similar function and so on. Readers are welcome to add in the message area.

Punched cards and punched paper tape-the first form of storage of mechanized information in 1890, the American statistician Herman Hollerith invented the punched card tabulator, which can record up to 960bits, used to collect and count census data, marking the beginning of the era of semi-automatic data processing systems. It is gradually widely used in the field of industrial retrieval and data statistics. Punch card and punch paper tape used in punch card tabulation machine is the input and output equipment of early computer, it converts programs and data into binary code, in which the hole is 1, the hole is 0, and then input into the computer by photoelectric scanning.

Magnetic tape-the beginning of the era of magnetic storage in 1928, German Dresno engineer Fritz Pfleumer invented the audio tape, which can store analog signals. The working principle of magnetic tape is that the crushed magnetic particles are glued to the paper and made into magnetic tape. However, due to the fragility of the note, the recording tape could not be applied at that time. In 1951, magnetic tapes began to be used for computer data storage, and one tape could replace ten thousand punched paper cards. In 1980, small cassette tapes appeared, and 90-minute tapes could record about 660KB data on each side.

Drum memory-the forerunner of hard disk drive in 1932, Gustav Tauschek, an Austrian engineer at IBM, invented drum memory, which is 16 inches long and has 40 tracks. It can rotate 12500 revolutions per minute and can only store 10KB data. Before the emergence of magnetic core memory, it was widely used in computer memory and was considered to be the predecessor of hard disk drive. The advantages of magnetic drum are practical, reliable and economical, while the biggest disadvantage is that the storage capacity is too small and the utilization rate is low.

(magnetic drum removed by a video recorder) Magnetic Core memory-the early version of random access memory (RAM) in 1949, Dr. An Wang of Harvard University Laboratory in the United States realized the technology of "reading and writing" to the magnetic core memory. The principle of the core memory is that the core can produce magnetization in two opposite directions according to the direction of the current during magnetization, which can be used as the state of 0 and 1 to record data. The original core memory had a capacity of only a few hundred bytes. Magnetic core memory was widely used as the main memory of computers in the 1970s until Intel's semiconductor DRAM memory was mass produced.

Hard drive-the era of disk storage in 1956, Reynold B. Johnson of IBM led the R & D team to invent the world's first hard disk, the IBM 305RAMAC. The drive is about the size of two refrigerators, weighs a ton, contains 50 24-inch disks, has a capacity of only 5MB, and has a data transfer speed of 10K / S. Today, desktop hard drives are generally 3. 5 inches in size, and products with 18TB capacity have been born.

Floppy disk-the earliest removable medium in personal computers introduced by IBM in 1971, floppy disks were widely used from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s, initially as 8-inch disks, then 5.25-inch and 3.5-inch disks. In 1971, the earliest read-only floppy disk capacity was 79.9 KB. A year later, a readable and writable version appeared. The floppy disk has the advantages of slow access speed and small capacity, but it is easy to install, unload and carry.

In 1982, Sony and Philips released the world's first commercial CD audio player, CDP-101, and CD-ROMs became popular. The early CDs, which were only used in the film industry, were 30cm in diameter and could record 60 minutes of video or audio on each side. Nowadays, the storage density of optical disc technology is increasing, and CD-ROM, DVD, D9, D18 and Blu-ray technology have appeared. CD-ROMs can still be seen on game consoles, retail movies, and materials that need to be preserved for a long time.

(the stand-alone games that Xiaobian loved in those years) Today's commonly used storage devices with the development of computers and the gradual advent of the Internet era, people's demand for information storage is increasing, which promotes the accelerated evolution of storage devices. Next, let's take a look at the storage devices commonly used today.

Solid State disk-A simplified computer system in 1989, the first solid state hard drive, also known as solid state drive, was made from an array of solid state electronic memory chips. Since then, SSD has gradually developed into market, and has been used in professional fields such as medical, aviation, military and other fields. Compared with the traditional hard disk, it has the advantages of fast reading and writing speed, shock resistance, low power consumption, no noise, portability and so on. At the same time, there is a life limit due to the limit of erasure times; in 2021, the market price is about 0.6-1 yuan per GB, which is slightly higher than that of mechanical hard drives with a price of 0.20 yuan per GB.

SD card-- memory card based on semiconductor flash memory technology in 1999, Japan's Panasonic, Toshiba and SanDisk of the United States jointly developed the SD card, the initial capacity is only 2-4-8 MB, in the constantly updated standard has now reached 128Compact 512 GB or even 1T. In the era when mobile phones were only used for communication and MP4 prevailed, SD cards became the main force for mobile data loading, mobile phones were stuffed with more songs to act as music players, and MP4 could download more movies to act as small televisions.

U disk-A storage device with a flash memory chip as a storage medium. U disk was first put on the market in 1998. In 2004, China Lanke Technology Company obtained the basic invention patent of flash drive officially authorized by the National Patent Office of the United States. "small stature, large capacity", between plugging in and unplugging, the files in the computer are packed and taken away at any time. In addition to the appearance can be rich and changeable, encryption U disk, boot U disk, antivirus U disk, temperature measurement U disk, music U disk and other functional products are also constantly developing.

Looking forward to the future of new technologies in cloud computing, big data, the Internet of things, artificial intelligence, the rapid development of today, people also ushered in the "information explosion" era. Information has exploded and storage is accelerating. It is believed that with the continuous progress of technology, storage devices, as the carrier of information, will also have a faster development. Let's talk about the future storage technology.

Nano-storage-- A major direction for possible future development in 1998, the University of Minnesota and Princeton University successfully developed quantum disks, a nano-array system composed of magnetic nanorods. One quantum disk is equivalent to our current 100000-1 million disks, while energy consumption is reduced by 10, 000 times.

In 2002, a research team at the University of Wisconsin developed atomic silicon memory materials, which store information 1 million times as dense as optical discs at present.

In 2014, Professor Sharon Grotez of the University of Michigan found that the combination of nanoparticles, like a Rubik's cube, twisted around a central point, and its state changes could be used to encode information like 0 and 1 strings.

Nano-storage fundamentally improves the storage capacity through a variety of methods, and replacing the existing storage media with ultra-high-density media and devices is an important development direction of storage devices in the future.

Cloud storage-A continuous development of storage technology. Finally, let's talk about cloud storage briefly. In popular terms, cloud storage is to store storage resources in a collection composed of many storage devices and servers, and users can easily access data "on the cloud" anytime and anywhere through any networked device.

Cloud storage supports the following two implementation modes:

Public cloud: storage is provided by a third party as a service and data is stored in different places. Users cannot control and do not understand the technologies used in the cloud. It is common for all kinds of cloud disks that we use in our daily life.

Private cloud: data centers develop internally and provide cloud services, such as storage space applications, rapid deployment of enterprise applications, etc.

Cloud storage improves storage efficiency and space utilization, and users can back up and transfer remote data at any time, reducing the cost of disaster recovery and backup units. At the same time, there are also hidden dangers such as infringement, disclosure of personal privacy and business data, spatial persistence, continuous charges and so on. Under the background of the Internet of everything and big data wave sweeping, cloud storage technology will continue to improve.

From the ancient knot notes to bamboo slips and paper to all kinds of information storage devices, with the continuous change of the expression of information, the data that can be recorded by storage devices is increasing day by day, and the speed is also accelerating. From a piece of paper can only record a few hundred words, to a few square centimeters can record dozens of stacks, and the development of storage devices will never stop here, we believe that the future!

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: ZTE documents (ID:ztedoc)

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