the history of storage devices

Selectron tubes

The first storage device was the selectron tube. It had storage of about 30 to 500 bytes, which by todays standards is nothing. It was expensive to manufacture however, and suffered from many problems, so it never became a success.

Punch cards

Punch cards actually predate computers they were actually used in the textiles industry in the 1700s to control mechanised looms.

Punched tapes

like the punch cards, the punch tape was originally made for the textiles industry but can be used as data input for computers.

Magnetic drum memory

invented in 1932 in Australia, it was used as the main memory of computers, and had about 10kb of storage.

Hard drive

the hard drive disk is the first storage device to have more than one gigabyte of storage. the early her drives were the size of a refrigerator. Hard drives today are now small enough to fit in a small laptop.

Questions and answers

1) What was the first storage device to be created?

2) What type of memory do solid state drives use?

3) When was magnetic drum memory developed?

4) SSD devices work kind of like a vinyl record. True/False

5) Data is stored in pages, what is it called when pages are clumped together?

6) what was the average storage range of a selectron tube?

7) what year was the floppy disc drive invented and who invented it?

8) What year was the hard drive invented?