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Punch CardsHerman Hollerith introduced the use of punch cards for the 1890 Census. Prior to this, the census took eight years. With the use of the punch card, the Census took one year.
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Gustav Tauschek from Austria created the first Drum Memory. Versions of his invention were used during the 1950s and into the 1960s. 10 KB of storage
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Drum Memories were used in various forms beginning in the 1930s and through the 1950s.
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Williams TubeThe first random access storage device for computers was invented by Fred Williams at England's Manchester University. .0625 KB of Storage
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UniservoThe Uniservo was the first commercially used tape drive. 128 bits of storage per inch
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IBM 350The 305 RAMAC was introduced by IBM in 1956. It was the first computer to include a disk drive damed the IBM 350. 4.4 MB of storage
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Cassette TapeCassette tapes were used as a cheap way to store data -- they were eventually replaced by the floppy disk. 660 KB of storage per side
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ST-506 The ST-506 was introduced by Seagate in 1980. It's storage capacity was only 5MB, but it's physical size was small, thus leading to the eventual reality of PC computers.
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IBM 3380 The IBM 3380 had the ability to store 2.52 billion characters of information.
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Floppy Disk The first floppy disk was inventedin 1967 -- it eventually evolved into the 3.5-inch diskette that could hold 360 kilobytes of information.
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CD-R First released in 1982 in Japan and 1983 in Europe, the DC is still commonly used. 700 MB of storage
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DAT First used to record and playback music, DAT became widely used storage medium. 1.3 GB of storage
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MiniDisc MD Data Sony launched the MiniDisc technology in 1992. 140 MB of storage
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Zip Drives A Zip Drive is a medium capacity disk storage sysem that was introduced by Iomega in late 1994. 100 MB of storage
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Seagate Barracuda The Seagate Barracuda was the first 7200 RPM drive. 2.5 GB of storage
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Microdrive IBM introduced the Microdrive in 1999. 170 MB of storage
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SD Cards Launched in 1999 by Panasocic, Toshiba, and SanDisk, SD cards have a variety of storage capabilities -- from 1.0 GB to 512 GB.
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Cloud Storage Cloud storage is the staple of modern day storage systems. It is virtually unlimited.
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IBM DiskOnKey Introduced by IBM in 2000, DiskOnKey storage had 8MB capabilities.
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Solid-State Drives Although the evolution of the Solid-State Drive spanned years, by 2008 the Solid-State Drive had 64 GB of storage.
