The History of Computer Storage

Jacquard invents the punched card

Oct 4, 1732

Joseph Marie Jacquard invents the punched card to control sequences of data on his patented line of clothing looms. http://whatis.techtarget.com/reference/History-of-the-punch-card

Magnetic drum memory is invented in Austria

Oct 4, 1932

Invented in 1932 in Austria, magnetic drum storage was the first type of constantly accessible memory for a computer to be useable. It paved the way for RAM (random access memory).
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/M/magnetic_drum.html

First commercially available flash memory

Oct 27, 1987

Toshiba sells the first EEPROM flash memory. Flash storage boasts almost no load times, however, it is very expensive for high capacities. http://www.flash25.toshiba.com/

Serial ATA storage format created

Oct 6, 2003

SATA (serial ATA) is the most used standard for storage interfaces. It is even used in the very computer you are reading this from.
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/definition/Serial-ATA

NVM express is conceptualized

Mar 1, 2011

NVMe storage was introduced as supposedly being the fastest storage medium ever made available to performance enthusiasts and high-end consumers.
http://searchsolidstatestorage.techtarget.com/definition/NVMe-non-volatile-memory-express

Samsung announces tiny solid-state drive

Oct 4, 2016

This SSD (solid-state drive) weighs less than a paper clip, holds 512 gigabytes of data, and has a unhealthily fast speed of 1,500 megabytes-per-second.
http://www.techradar.com/news/computing-components/storage/this-ssd-weighs-less-than-a-paper-clip-but-holds-512gb-1322513

First Hard Drive is created

Oct 6, 2016

The IBM 350 Disk File, invented by Reynold Johnson, was introduced in 1956 with the IBM 305 RAMAC computer. This drive had fifty 24-inch (0.6 m) platters, with a total capacity of five million 6-bit characters (3.75 megabytes).
http://www.pcworld.com/article/127105/article.html