Computer Storage From the 80's to Now - From Cassettes to Floppies to Ramdisks and Hard Drives.

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Sometime around 1987 or so I got my first "real" computer. Up until that time I had been using a TI-99/4A - arguably the best "home computer" available. This little computer was great--I actually taught myself how to program on it. Unfortunately when I first started, the only way to save a file I had worked on was to send it to a cassette tape. Yes, a cassette tape.
It took a long, long time to save anything to cassette, as you might imagine. And you had to use a new cassette for every file you wanted to save. It didn't matter though, that was all I knew so I couldn't complain. A year or two later I invested in a 5.25 inch floppy drive. My dreams had come true. The floppy drive was quick and it could keep more than one program at time. It was the best.
The TI didn't stick around long enough to enjoy the greatness of the hard drive, but we did get a sneak peak of what they might be like when some company invented a ramdisk for it. The ramdisk was kind of like a hard drive, but all the information was saved to memory. It was super fast and could store vast amounts of data (of course "vast" is a relative term), but it could only store information while the computer was on. Once the power went off, your files were gone. By the way, you can add a ramdisk on your computer today with software if you want some quick, temporary storage space.
Around 1987 a friend's father passed on to me his Olivetti portable (or or as they used to say - lug-able) computer. It came with a built-in hard drive--my first. It was a whopping 8 megabytes!
Since then, hard drives have advanced a little bit. Today 8 meg wouldn't hold the smallest toolbar software. Today's hard drives are measured in gigabytes or even terabytes (1,000 gigabytes). Looking at it now, the bigger these things get, the more it amazes me. If airplanes had advanced as much as hard drives since 1990, planes would probably hold a small country and travel from ocean to ocean in about a minute and a half.
With hard drives storing so much data, and being so cost effective, most people are adding new harddrives to their systems. And why not? It beats keeping a truckload of cassette tapes around.

Article Source: http://depositarticles.com/

John J. Woods has written about computers since 1984. He contributes regularly to www.maxtorharddrives.com

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