10 Types of Portable Data Storage from Computer History

Computer history doesn’t go back very far in time, less than a century. However, it has been such a fast paced progression that the means of data storage have changed several times during those few short decades. As data compression increased the physical area needed to store data has continually gotten smaller and smaller, just as the computers themselves have.

For a little computer nostalgia, we’ve provided a list of ten types of portable data storage that have been used in the past and their progression from one to another.

1. Tape reels – Early computers were very large, filling entire rooms. Their initial means of storing information was magnetic tape that wound around large open reels over 10 inches in diameter. Not exactly what we would think of as a ‘portable’ size. For the ‘main frame’ computers these reels of tape were the standard storage base from the 1950′s’ until the early 1980′s.
2. Punch cards – This form of data storage has been around longer than computers themselves and have been used in a variety of applications. The typical IBM format was made of smooth card stock that was exactly sized in height, width and thickness. A card had 80 columns and 12 punch areas in each column. Data was entered onto the cards by a card punch machine. Punch cards were used well into the 1970′s.
3. 8” floppy – The first ‘floppy disk’ was 8 inches in diameter and held 80 kilobytes of data. It was released in 1971 and called a memory disk. To avoid dust contamination of the disk, it was enclosed in a plastic envelope lined with fabric. In 1976 Verbatim improved the disk by adding a teflon coating to the disk itself, eliminating the need for the cleaning sleeve. Verbatim’s disk was a SSSD format, or Single Sided Single Density and held as much data as a box of 2000 punch cards. The disks quickly evolved to a double-sided format, and a double density format as well.
4. 5-1/4 floppy disk – Because of the large size of the 8 inch disks, their disk drives were quite expensive. As computers continued to decrease in size the need to decrease the size of the storage medium and the disk drive itself, became evident. Disks were soon developed at a more manageable size of 5-1/4 inches, which made the drives much smaller and more affordable. They became the standard for the newly developing, compact computers and were holding up to 1,200 KB of data by 1984.
5. 3” floppy – Almost simultaneously with the 5-1/4” floppy, smaller 3 inch floppies were being developed. Besides being smaller, and holding the same amount of data as the 5-1/4 disk, the 3” floppy was encased in hard plastic to protect the disk. It was a two-sided disk, but only one side could be read at a time. Several different types were developed by different firms, as each looked to achieve what would be eventually adopted as the new standard.
6. 3-1/2 floppy – Sony had gone with a 3-1/2 inch encased disk, which became the market standard after they were able to convince Apple Computers to install their drives in their new Macintosh computers in 1984. In 1988 the 3-1/2 inch disk had increased its data storage capacity to 1.44 MB of high density data.
7. Tape cartridges – In spite of the popularity of the floppy disks, they were still very limited in their storage capacity. When a larger storage capacity was needed, such as for backups on an entire computer system, magnetic tape was still the ideal. However, the tape medium had also decreased in size. Tape cartridges were small and enclosed in plastic, with one reel inside.
8. Cassette tapes – As the two-reeled audio cassette tape became popular for recording audio sound, it also became the tape medium for larger computer data storage, as well.
9. Compact Disks – As program sizes increased and multiple floppy disks were being required to store and install software programs, the need for a new storage medium became evident. The compact disk, or CD became the newest medium, able to store many times more data than the floppy disks and in a non-magnetic format.
10. Flash drive – Currently the most popular portable storage is the usb flash drive. The amount of data storage on one of these small units would boggle the mind of those early computer programmers who worked with the large open reels of magnetic tape.

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