Technology Timeline - Storage

  • Maurice Wilkes with EDSAC

    Maurice Wilkes at the University of Cambridge make the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator. It was a stored program computer, used mercury.
  • Manchester Mark I Williams-Kilburn tube

    Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn develop the Williams-Kilburn tube. Was the first high speed, electronic storage
  • Magnetic Drum

    Completed in 1950, Atlas used magnetic drum memory that stored information on the outside of a rotating cylinder coated with ferromagnetic material and circled by read/write heads.
  • IBM 726 dual tape drive

    Magnetic tape allowed for inexpensive mass storage of information and was announced on May 21, 1952, the system used a vacuum channel method of keeping a loop of tape circulating between two points, which allowed the tape drive to start and stop the tape in a split-second.
  • Card Random Access Memory

    Each CRAM deck of 256 cards recorded about 5.5 MB.
  • IBM 2321 Data Cell Drive

    IBM’s 2321 Data Cell Drive stored up to 400 MB.Was not very reliable, after improvements, became relatively reliable
  • “Sawmill” disk drive cutaway

    The first model had two 1 GB hard disk assemblies and the second model had two 1.5 GB.
  • CompacTape

    Originally held 92 MB of data, was upgraded and could later hold up to 800 GB of data.
  • Deskstar 1TB HDD

    1st 1TB hard drive, used five 3.5 inch 200 GB platters, and rotated at 7,200 RPM
  • IBM

    120 petabyte, or 120 million gigabytes is one of the biggest storage devices we have today.