Hard Drive Evolution

Part I of Essay
Even before the first commercial computers appeared in 1951, "mass" storage, although minuscule by today's standards, was a necessity. As early as the mid-1800s, punch cards were used to provide input to early calculators and other machines. The 1940s ushered in the decade ....

Part II of Essay
.... MB of storage, the equivalent of 2,500 to 5,000 pages of double-spaced typed information, into a device the size of a small shoebox. At the time, a storage capacity of 10 MB was considered too large for a so-called "personal" computer. The first PCs used removable floppy disks as storage devices almost exclusively. The term "floppy" accurately fit the earliest 8-inch PC diskettes and the 5.25-inch diskettes that succeeded them. The inner disk that holds the data usually is made of Mylar and coated with a magnetic oxide, and the outer, plasti ....