I have spent some time discussing computing megatrends. I had previously looked at the explosion in computer processing and bandwidth. Here, I will be looking at the corresponding explosive trends in digital storage. Together, these three megatrends are responsible for the current age of extremely networked, ubiquitous computing that we are experiencing. Specifically, the unit costs of digital storage have been drastically falling such that storage density is doubling every 13 months without a corresponding increase in price. This is known as Kryder’s law, named after Mark Kryder, who made the observation in the mid-2000s and was at the time, Chief Technology Officer of Seagate Corp., a hard disk manufacturer. This has made digital storage ridiculously cheap, leading to the explosion in data generation.
It would serve us well to understand how we got to this point. It all started with the invention of punch cards in 1801. Interestingly this pioneering innovation did not first take place in the world of computing. It first took place in the world of textile manufacturing. They were invented by Frenchman, Joseph-Marie Jacquard to automate the weaving of complex patterns into fabric. Punch cards were made of thick cardboard or stiff paper containing holes arranged in a grid, with the presence or absence of a hole analogous to the ones and zeros of digital computers. Thus they were the first form of digital storage. Punch cards would be adopted by Sir Charles Babbage, an early computing pioneer for his so-called ‘Analytical Engine’ in the 1830s, which was a mechanical computer he was designing at the time but that he never completely built.
In the 1880s, punch cards would be repurposed by an American named Herman Hollerith for a machine he invented to tabulate statistics. His machines were used by the US government to carry out a population census in 1890. Hollerith would found a company that ultimately became IBM.
The next major innovation in digital storage was the magnetic tape, developed shortly after the invention of electronic computers in the 1940s/50s. Magnetic tape consisted of a thin plastic coated with magnetic material. It also had features for magnetically reading and writing data from, and to the tape. Magnetic tape was followed by the of the magnetic hard disk drive in 1956. This was followed by the removable hard drive in 1963, which could be removed from a computer while the system is running. The removable hard drive made it easy for users to backup and transfer data from one computer to another.
The year 1971 saw the introduction of the floppy disk which was originally developed by IBM. The term ‘floppy disk’ was due to the flexibility of the diskette inside a protective plastic casing. At the time, the floppy disk revolutionized data storage and became the popular method of storing and transferring data.
In the year 1983, the Compact Disc (CD) would be invented. The CD could be read but not written to. The disc could hold large amounts of data including text, images, and audio. It functioned by inserting the disc into a CD drive, where a laser beam scanned the disc’s surface to retrieve the data stored in a spiral track. The data was transformed into a digital signal that the computer could process.
The next major innovation came in 1999, with the invention of the Secure Digital (SD) card, which is a small removable flash memory card that can contain high-capacity memory and is commonly used in digital devices such as cameras, smartphones, tablets, and gaming consoles. SD cards are characterized by their compact size, durability, and high storage capacity.
SD cards were very quickly followed in 2000, by Universal Serial Bus (USB) flash drives. The flash drive is a portable storage device that utilizes flash memory technology to store and transfer data. The flash drive consists of a compact circuit board enclosed in a plastic or metal casing with a USB connector at one end. The connector allows the USB to easily be plugged into a USB port, enabling data transfer. The drive is commonly used for data backup, file sharing, and software installation.
The 2000s also saw the introduction of Solid State Drives (SSD) which unlike Hard Disk Drives, contain no moving parts and are faster and more reliable.
The 2010s saw the emergence of cloud computing, and along with it, that of cloud storage. The major cloud computing providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), provide massive storage solutions and infrastructure. These providers operate vast data centers with an enormous number of servers to offer scalable and available storage solutions.
What does the future hold for digital storage? The research into the possibility of using DNA as a storage device, but this work is still largely experimental. There is also research into using glass as a storage medium where data is etched into quartz glass using lasers. There is yet also research into using holograms to store data (A hologram is a three-dimensional, lifelike image created by the interference of light beams, which provides a realistic sense of depth that can be viewed from multiple angles without special glasses or lenses).
Whatever the future of digital storage, it is sure to be as exciting as its pasts.
