And, by the way, the 1st computer I worked with (long before I owned one) had a large operator's console with 16 KB (yes I said KB) of memory, and card storage.  And before that I worked in an auto plant where the "Tab Room" featured a wired-board programmed IBM computer that did an amazing 6 FLOPs/sec.!!

Now I carry a shirt-pocket internet-able device with 64 GB, and falling behind the curve every day.

There was also the punch-card Jacquard textile looms in the 19th century that probly inspired Hollerith.  And does anyone remember "Otsego Project", which I recall as an experimental large scale drum storage machine by old AT&T.

That's MY H|W done then!!!! Thank-You very much for creating this website!!!!!

I remember my first program, on Hollerith cards. My first computer had 64 MB of memory. I thought I was living in the fast lane. Today, life really is fast and getting faster. My children know more about computers than most graduates did when I finished. Don't ask when, I won't tell.

Thanks to these Computer architectures who continued this cycle of memory devices improvement and now a days don't having any problem while carrying 500Gb hard disk in our pocket.

I used everyone of these in my career starting in the early 1960's.

I had that exact same Commodore cassette player for my Vic 20, you just brought back memories of an innocent childhood 25 years ago. Cheers.

Interesting. First, I could never figure out why anyone would want to spend so much money to build such a big harddisk with only 5MB of space! Though thanks to IBM and all the genius that keep working on this, and we get to enjoy our small size laptop with Gigabytes of spaces. =)

It really is amazing to see how fast technology develops. I remember years ago when a 64Mb HDD was the latest tech. Now you can get over 1Tb. Simply incredible.

Oh boy ., I am old. I remember punch cards while in college.

Way to make me feel old, guys. I actually used [i.e. programmed with] both punch cards and paper tape. It felt high tech at the time.

Hey, no one has mentioned the other storage medium that was widely used by consumers beginning around 1900 -- Piano rolls. These were similar to punched tape, but were large paper rolls that each contained a tune. The mechanism in the piano used air pressure through the holes in the paper that caused the wires inside to be struck by the felt hammers to produce the tune.

actually on some systems it would play out loud when loading a cassette, most systems used the output of the cassette player which disabled the internal speaker, i had a ti/99 that would play the cassette’s while loading them.

Hi all! As a fresh royal.pingdom.com user i just want to say hello to everyone else who uses this site :D

Thanks! gut text

Commodore released a new version of the casette unit, called Load-It! if I recall correctly, with a knob to adjust the head (and a led meter showing the level of signal), instead of just hole for a screw driver because of the unreliability of loading non-pirated software. I never had a Load-It Datasette, so loading games was a pain in the backside.

I recall that drum memory was also used for primary data storage (RAM). It was used as random access memory in early computers. I think the Jargon file has an anecdote about the first programmer who optimized his code to the spin rate of the drum so that the next instruction would be read just-in-time, without delay (a whole revolution of the drum, which was a considerable amount of time then). On the Commodore 64 Datasette many confuse the sound produced through the sound chip when loading some programs using a tape turbo (data compression program to reduce the time to load the main program), which some commercial game compilations used. Other home computer casette units may have produced sound, but on the Commodore 64 it was purely an annoying cosmetic touch by the programmer of the turbo loader (together with a flashing and/or striped screen). The reason for the flashing screen was purely practical though, as most commercial tapes were recorded at such a low level (to make it difficult to just dub the tape to thwart piracy) that you had to adjust the datasette read head with a screw driver to be able to load the damn game; if the screen stopped flashing while loading you knew you had to adjust the head and try again.

Other forms of storage which could be added: The 12" floppy disk - 1Mb, hard-shell case, used on late-60s, early 70 IBM machines, among them System 360, Model 44 DECtape - used in a number of DEC (Digital Equipment Corp. machines in the PDP series. This was a 1" reel, about 3-4" in diamter, held 350 Kb (if I remember correctly), and could be read/written in either direction. Its main claim to fame was that you could unspool some tape, wad it up in your hand, straighten it out (leaving folds & wrinkles), respool it, and read it without errors. Sort of like a tape-era USB key. The IBM 2311 (7 platter) & 2314 (14 platter) removable disk pack with completely unshielded platters, about 14" in diameter. Used in IBM System/360 and /370 mainframes as primary storage.

A couple of interesting thoughts partially relating to memory and older computer systems. DO NOT RUN with a box of punch cards. If I was in a hurry to get my time on the computer, I always ended up tripping and spilling the lot. They then needed to be reordered and my slot was lost. Sound from a C64 only when listening on an ordinary cassette player OR when correctly set, typed and spaced a friend had silent night on a dot matrix printer. I still have Microsoft Pascal Compiler manual and disks in original plastic box. My first introduction to Basic programing was on the states first mainframe, accidentally created an infinite loop. Put it out of commission for about an hour, while we tried to remove it. Never saw bureaucrats move so fast!

actually on some systems it would play out loud when loading a cassette, most systems used the output of the cassette player which disabled the internal speaker, i had a ti/99 that would play the cassette's while loading them.

That was a blast from the past, I enjoyed the read and browse through the images.

Great information, but one error, and one omission: The first floppy disk was the IBM 2315, which was 12" across, in a hard plastic case, and held 1 Mb. It was the main disk drive on the IBM 360, Model 44, which I programmed in college. You omitted the DECtape, which was about 3" diameter, has a 2" spindle (center hole), and was 1" wide. The DECtape's claim to fame was it was almost error-proof. You could unroll a bunch of DECtape; wad, crinkle, & fold it up in your hand; and it could then be read and written without errors. The DECtape was used on Digital Equipment's PDP-series of mainframes and minicomputers (PDP-8,10,11 that I know of). But great post!

Way to make me feel old, guys. I actually used [i.e. programmed with] both punch cards and paper tape. It felt high tech at the time. We would write batch programs using IBC job control language, and then wait for the programs to run. It seemed high tech at the time, now it seems so old. I am very glad you are keeping a historical record of computing.

i got what i actually wanted from this website thank you

I started selling the 8" and 10" SMD Drives. Remember CDC,Fujitsu. Emulex corp was one of the first to create the 3rd party disk market selling up against Dec. We made emulation controllers that put third party disk and tape products on the manufacturers cpu. This was back in the early eighties. EMC and Netapp were not even a dream yet. EMC made 4 meg add on memory cards. They could not even spell storage. The days of the big iron wars. We were selling the stuff for about $300.00 per meg.

Re: EDIT: Removed the comment about the Commodore Datassette sound, since it was a factual error: Removed this: “(For those who weren’t there, you could hear the sound of the data being read as a high-pitched, screechy sound while you were loading your programs.)” This is actually technically correct, at least for a short period of time... Before the Commodore branded tape drive came out, they sold an adapter for use with an ordinary cassette tape recorder. It was a wire that plugged into the Vic20 or C64 motherboard and then into the mic input of the recorder. You then pushed play and record to start the tape drive and then ran the "save" command. It was a REAL pain because you had to get the record volume just right. While it was recording you could hear the squeals and hisses. The dedicated tape drive was really an improvement-- especially because of the counter. With that you could put more than one program on a cassette tape. Yes.. I had both, the cable and the Commodore branded tape drive. That was a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...

intresting improvement in technology.

Regarding the tape sound - You had the correct phenomenon, but the wrong computer. The secondhand Atari 800 I had as a kid used to be noisy as hell when you would load or save a tape (CLOAD or CSAVE), though it sounded more like a robotic truck horn with a chest cold.

interesting trip down memory lane. I have 3 old lugable computers sitting in my garage collecting dust. combined they have about the storage space of my iphone

I remember the cassette tape drive of my first computer, Radio Shack's TRS-80 Model 1 Level 2. It's hard to believe how many cassettes I used up learning that system. Later on I got a TRS-80 Model III with a 5.25" floppy disk. Of course as soon as I could I created flippies for it, to save money and double my space. The orginal was only 180KB, by making another eye hole in the floppy I could have another side to the disk. Later years I went to a school that still had some of the Model IIIs in use. One had an external hard drive, about the size of three laptops stacked on top of each other. It held a whole 5MB of data. It ammazed me at the time.

I remember seeing a product that would print programs on a laser printer that could be read by a hand-held plug-in device. The output looked similar to the optical data storage area on the back of some states drivers licenses. I don't remember what it was called but I actually did spring for one. Programs could be entered in a blazing three to five minutes instead of hours! This made getting programs for those Apple ][ computers much easier as we used to type in whole programs in BASIC right from sources such as Nibble Magazine. (http://www.nibblemagazine.net/) It was not uncommon (among nerds at least) to spend several days keying in a multi-page program that looked cool. The rest of the world just wondered what we were doing.

There were also so mini punch cards in the mid-1970s that were 2"-3" square. They didn't last long as the floppy came in about the same time.

That's a nice piece, back in 87' when I took computer classes to learn BASIC (I was in seventh grade), we were required to get a 3.5" floppy disc. I got one too though never used it and I still have it. It's an antique, Wonder what I'll get for it on eBay. :)

Hi. The relay on the Electron and BBC Microcomputers was to control the cassette motor, so that it stopped after loading or saving. It may also have controlled the volume, but only with specially-adapted cassette recorders. Hearing the data was essential! I remember getting my first 5.25" floppy drive, single-sided, 40K. It cost about £100. I also remember using the cassette relay to switch my amateur radio transceiver between transmit and receive. We used to send programs to each other by radio. Magic days!

May I contribute with a missing landmark in the history of magnetic tape data storage? Its the DC100 Data Cartridge, a 3.5" digital data and program mass storage unit developed to fit into thee HP9825 desk computer, launched in 1976 with a 16-bit "triple core" hybrid microprocessor – fantastic for numerical processing, interfacing and automation and years ahead of the 8-bit microcomputers from APPLE and IBM PC with 5.25" floppy disk drives. The quarter-inch-wide tape minicartridge (QIC) & drive is much smaller than the 8" floppy disk & drive from the 70ties (3.5" floppies appeared in 1981) and much faster and reliable than analog storage on cassete tape. The QIC originated an entire tape-backup industry and evolved to capacities of up to 20-Gbyte. QIC-backup dominated the scene till surpassed in capacity and speed by the hard disks in the 21st century. More about: http://www.hp9825.com/html/dc100_tape.html http://www.hp9825.com/html/hybrid_microprocessor.html http://www.answers.com/topic/minicartridge Application examples of the HP 9825 (with the DC 100) from our lab: http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0022072899001618 and http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/livredocencia/46/tde-29022008-142848.

I still have some "floppy" floppy disks (5.25 inch) & a 40 Meg disk that occupies twice the space of a modern hard disk. State of the art technology, that was!

Any way to send you a comment including photos? Al Weiss IBM 1959-1973

Many devices used SHIFT REGISTERS as a storage media. For example, the early display terminals ("CRTs") were in fact teletype terminals, operating at blazing speeds of 1200..9600 Bauds, connected to COM1 of mini-omputers and early PCs [*]. The display area typically had 24(/25) lines, 80 chars/line, for a total of 1960..2000+ characters (25th line: status data) which needed to be stored somehow. A shift register is like a bench, a row of chairs. Put many of these around a clock until the end of the last bench touches the begin of the first one. You now have a circle, a ring with thousands of chairs arranged around that clock. The way it works, on every chair sits either a "0" or a "1". Each time the clock ticks they all stand up, make one step to the right and sit down again. The last one on every bench now sits in first place of the next bench and... The electron beam, as it is redrawing the display advances to the same clock beat. After every 7th tick it gets to see who sits on "Bench No.1" and displays the graphic that corresponds to the 7 bits sitting on this bench at that instant. Say new data arrives, bit by bit it is entering the circle at some "Bench Nr.77". As new bits enter bench-77 the ones leaving bench-76 are lost as they step on a trap door and fall into the bit bucket. [*] The alternative was memory mapped video, a portion of the PC's RAM used as video buffer and a graphics card (CGA = IBM/PC Color Graphics Adapter), converting the RAM content into RGB video signals, sent a video monitor (a fast TV without tuner/receiver circuitry).

David: Looks like a control panel from some Unit Record device. Similar to those for the 402/408, but probably a one-off machine. Wired a lot of machine in early 60's. BTW: If you tuned a radio between stations and set it on top of an IBM tape drive, you could create music on it by the data you sent to the tape. Knew a chape who spent months to make it play Mary Had A Little Lamb.

My dad just turned 70 last week and when my roommate showed him her iPhone he was amazed (he's not real techie) It got him talking about hen he was in the Air Force back in the 50s and early 60s they had whole BUILDINGS for just one computer that couldn't do what a pocket calculator can do. I worked in a hotel several years ago that had a mainframe computer that took the 8 inch disks that had a whopping 76K on them and used tapes to run the back-ups. Seeing the pix of those "floppies" brought back a lot of memories. Great article

I recall a description of a system that used a video camera pointed at an oscilloscope to store 32 bits altogether.

i remember using tapes on my msx to play games. the sound was there, it made me know that the process was working. Found!

Back in the mid to late 1960s, I worked on the Litton DIANE system on the Grumman A-6A Intruder. Our support bench was called a SASE, and was driven by a paper tape/aluminized mylar tape system. When we had a correction to the program, we got a slip of tape from Litton, and cut and "patched" the correction into the tape. Today we are still "patching" our systems. Also in the DIANE system, there was a drum memory. It sat between the B/N's (Bombardier/Navigator)legs. If I recall, it was 144 tracks, and we had to do two fetches of 4 bits, to make a one 8 bit, byte. We didn't even have ICs then, a gate was built "chord wood" style and was one inch square on each end, and about one and a half inches long.

Hey Keith! I came to the comments to make the exact same comment about mercury delay lines being my favorite...and I'm named Keith too. :)

Here's another person who remembers that the old Atari 410 cassette recorder for Atari 400 and 800 computers did play the amazing screech erroneously attributed to the Commodore. I'm fairly confident that the only reason the screech existed was because you'd surely think the system had hung if you didn't hear something. At an effective read/write rate of about 35 bytes per second (600 baud with long inter-record gaps), reading or writing a file took forever. http://www.atariarchives.org/dere/chaptC.php for substantiation.

I love the fact that the HAL 9000, with its ability to recognize the movement of lips and human drawings, was running off of punch cards. For those of you who don't believe me, see "2001" and fast forward to the point where HAL detects the fault in the AE-35 unit. Dave will ask for a hard copy of the report, and HAL prints out an actual punch card.

What about the Kado (not sure of the spelling) I rember my Dad running one in the Early 80s' it had a 8" floppy disk. He used to brag that he could run his entire business on 2 floppy disks!

Also - plated wire store (faster than core) - magnetorestrictive store (a delay-line technology)