Storage

1956 IBM's Rey Johnson in front of RAMAC 350 Disk File The era of magnetic disk storage dawned with IBM´s shipment of a 305 RAMAC to Zellerbach Paper in San Francisco. The IBM 350 disk file served as the storage component for the Random Access Method of Accounting and Control. It consisted of 50 magnetically coated metal platters with 5 million bytes of data. The platters, stacked one on top of the other, rotated with a common drive shaft.

1961 The IBM 1301 Disk Storage System IBM 1301 Disk Storage Unit is released. The IBM 1301 Disk Drive was announced on June 2nd, 1961 for use with IBM’s 7000-series of mainframe computers. Maximum capacity was 28 million characters and the disks rotated at 1,800 R.P.M. The 1301 leased for $2,100 per month or could be purchased for $115,500. The drive had one read/write arm for each disk as well as flying heads, both of which are still used in today’s disk drives.

1962 Tom Kilburn in front of Manchester Atlas console Virtual memory emerged from a team under the direction of Tom Kilburn at the University of Manchester. Virtual memory permitted a computer to use its storage capacity to switch rapidly among multiple programs or users and is a key requirement for timesharing.

Four Views of the IBM 1311 Including Removable Disk Pack IBM 1311 Disk Storage Drive is announced. Announced on October 11, 1962, the IBM 1311 was the first disk drive IBM made with a removable disk pack. Each pack weighed about ten pounds, held six disks, and had a capacity of 2 million characters. The disks would rotate at 1,500 RPM and were accessed by a hydraulic actuator with one head per disk. [storage] The 1311 offered some of the advantages of both tapes and disks.

1967 The IBM Photo Digital Storage System, code-named Cypress IBM 1360 Photo-Digital Storage System is delivered. In 1967, IBM delivered the first of its photo-digital storage systems to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The system could read and write up to a trillion bits of information—the first such system in the world.. The 1360 used thin strips of film which were developed with bit patterns via a photographic developing system housed in the machine. The system used sophisticated error correction and a pneumatic robot to move the film strips to and from a storage unit. Only five were built.

1971 IBM 23FD 8 An IBM team, originally led by David Noble, invented the 8-inch floppy diskette. It was initially designed for use in loading microcode into the controller for the "Merlin" (IBM 3330) disk pack file. It quickly won widespread acceptance as a program and data-storage medium. Unlike hard drives, a user could easily transfer a floppy in its protective jacket from one drive to another.

1978 Original Shugart SA400 5 1/4" Floppy Disk Drive The 5 1/4" flexible disk drive and diskette were introduced by Shugart Associates in 1976. This was the result of a request by Wang Laboratories to produce a disk drive small enough to use with a desktop computer, since 8" floppy drives were considered too large for that purpose. By 1978, more than 10 manufacturers were producing 5 1/4" floppy drives.

1980 Shugart ST506 5MB Hard Disk Drive Seagate Technology created the first hard disk drive for microcomputers, the ST506. The disk held 5 megabytes of data, five times as much as a standard floppy disk, and fit in the space of a floppy disk drive. The hard disk drive itself is a rigid metallic platter coated on both sides with a thin layer of magnetic material that stores digital data. Seagate Technology grew out of a 1979 conversation between Alan Shugart and Finis Conner, who had worked together at IBM. The two men decided to found the company after developing the idea of scaling down a hard disk drive to the same size as the then-standard 5 1/4-inch floppies. Upon releasing its first product, Seagate quickly drew such big-name customers as Apple Computer and IBM. Within a few years, it had sold 4 million units.

1981    The first optical data storage disk had 60 times the capacity of a 5 1/4-inch floppy disk. Developed by Phillips, the disk stored data as marks burned by a laser that could not be overwritten — making it useful for storing large quantities of information that didn't need to change.  Two years later, Phillips created an erasable optical disk using special material, a laser, and magnetism to combine the capacity of an optical disk with the convenience of an option to erase and rewrite--the magneto-optical (MO) system.  MO drives had a short life as they were replaced by rewritable CD and DVDs.

Sony 3 1/2 Sony introduced and shipped the first 3 1/2" floppy drives and diskettes in 1981. The first signficant company to adopt the 3 1/2" floppy for general use was Hewlett-Packard in 1982, an event which was critical in establishing momentum for the format and which helped it prevail over the other contenders for the microfloppy standard, including 3", 3 1/4", and 3.9" formats.

1983 Original Bernoulli Box The Bernoulli Box is released. Using disks that included the read/write head inside them, the Bernoulli Box was a special type of disk drive that allowed people to move large files between computers when few alternatives (such as a network) existed. Allowing for almost twenty times the amount of storage afforded by a regular floppy disk, the cartridges came in capacities ranging from 35MB to 230MB.

1984    Able to hold 550 megabytes of prerecorded data, CD-ROMs grew out of regular CDs on which music is recorded. The first general-interest CD-ROM product released after Philips and Sony announced the CD-ROM in 1984 was "Grolier´s Electronic Encyclopedia," which came out in 1985. The 9 million words in the encyclopedia only took up 12 percent of the available space. The same year, computer and electronics companies worked together to set a standard for the disks so any computer would be able to access the information.

1994 Early Zip Drive with Disks The Iomega Zip Disk is released. The Zip Disk was based on Iomega’s Bernoulli Box system of file storage that used special removable disk packs. Using the Bernoulli system as a model, the initial Zip system allowed 100MB to be stored on a cartridge roughly the size of a 3 ½ inch floppy disk. Later versions increased the capacity of a single disk from 100Mbytes to 2GB.