Category Archives: Information storage
From Megabyte to Zettabyte: How Big?
“If you wrote out the information contained in one megabyte by hand, the resulting line of 1s and 0s would be more than five times as tall as Mount Everest. If you wrote out one gigabyte by hand, it would … Continue reading
Posted in Big Data, Information storage, Measurement
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Writing Systems of the World Today
Wikipedia: A writing system is an organized regular method (typically standardized) of information storage and transfer for the communication of messages (expressing thoughts or ideas) in a language by visually (or possibly tactilely) encoding and decoding (known as writing and reading) with a set of signs or symbols, both known generally as characters (with the set collective referred to as a ‘script’). These characters, often including letters and numbers, are usually recorded onto … Continue reading
Disk Drive Manufacturers: And Then There Were Three…
storagenewsletter.com has assembled a list of 218 manufacturers of hard disk drives (HDD) that have entered this market since the disk drive was introduced by IBM in 1956. Today, only three remain: Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital.
From the Archives: Storage Bottleneck Born
Today in 1945, John von Neumann published “A First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC.” Campbell-Kelly and Aspray call it in Computer: The History of the Information Machine “the technological basis for the worldwide computer industry.” In A History of Modern Computing, Paul … Continue reading
The IBM 1301 Disk Storage Announced
Today in 1961, IBM announced the IBM 1301 Disk Storage Unit. The storage capacity per square inch of surface was increased 13 times over what it had been with the first disk drive, the IBM 350 Disk Storage Unit, introduced five … Continue reading
The MiniDisc Announced
Today in 1991, Sony’s President Norio Ohga announced the MiniDisc as the new personal audio format. From Sony’s official history: “Ohga had led the establishment of the CD business, and CD technology had quickly replaced analog audio technology thanks to its … Continue reading
50 Years of Memory Management
50 years ago today, one of the first software patent applications is filed by the British Petroleum Company. It proposes to “solve automatically a linear programming problem by means of an iterative algorithm whereby it (a) transfers data representations from the … Continue reading
First Disk Drive Announced
Today in 1955, IBM made an announcement that went largely unnoticed outside the computer community and other technical circles. The company reported that a team of engineers working in a small research and development laboratory in San Jose, California, had … Continue reading
One Billion Hard Drives and Counting
Today in 2008, Seagate Technology announced that it was the first hard drive manufacturer worldwide to have shipped 1 billion hard drives. The 1 billion hard drives Seagate has delivered equates to approximately 79 million terabytes, able to store 158 billion hours … Continue reading
Back to the Future: Re-centralizing storage
IDC: “One of the major themes affecting the HDD forecast is the shift in demand for HDDs in client devices. While PCs will continue to represent the largest market for HDDs in terms of unit shipments, revenue derived from HDDs … Continue reading
The Story of Information 