A few months ago, I was in the world’s last brick and mortar IT retail store looking for a flash drive, and I was astonished to find that the only available size was 2 terabytes, with a price tag under $20. A child of the ‘90s, I vaguely remember the emergence of flash drives; I thought I was cool in middle school because I had a 128 megabyte flash drive full of music and homework (I was never cool). What I experienced in miniature is a historical pattern that goes all the way back to the post-war boom; technology has been getting exponentially more inexpensive over the last several decades.
I am certainly not the first person to ever point this out, but I thought it would be interesting to take a peek at this trend and the technological achievements that have driven it.
In the post-war era, large magnetic drums were used to store data. These instruments worked by turning a metal cylinder across a magnetic surface, reading binary code inscribed on the magnets. These devices could hold only a few kilobytes of data; the equivalent of about 5 pages of plain text on paper. There was clearly a little room for improvement.
The introduction of disk storage in the late 1950s marked a turning point. These discs were immediately recognizable as a microchip, and their size made them convenient for very niche situations. For example, the guidance systems used in the space race ran on these early microchips. However, these chips were difficult to manufacture and impossible to scale, so prices remained out of reach for casual consumers. By the 1960s, improvements to memory density had reduced the cost of data storage to about a penny per bit (that’s $80 per kilobyte). For most people and businesses, paper was still simply more cost-effective.
The first commercially viable digital storage came in the 1970s: the iconic floppy disk, immortalized in save icons everywhere to this day. This storage medium uses a magnetic strip encased in protective plastic to store information. The original 8-inch floppy disks could hold nearly 250kB of storage and sold for $5. This price point would make floppy disks culturally relevant well into the ‘90s.
The 1980s saw the rise of the hard disk drive (HDD). HDDs work similarly to vinyl records; a small magnetic disk whirs quickly under an actuator arm that reads the information stored on the disk, and can be stored inside the tower of a home computer, which were conveniently becoming more popular by the ‘80s and ‘90s. HDDs are still a primary source of physical memory storage today, though quicker solid state drives (SSD) are becoming an industry standard.
By the late 1980s, optical storage had become the most popular form of external storage. CDs, DVDs, and BluRay disks are all forms of optical storage; they are small disks, on which lasers can burn patterns that can then be detected by a second laser. These small disks, for the first time in history, allowed a useful amount of data to be held in the palm of your hand. This has had a lasting cultural impact on the way people enjoy music with the rise of the boombox and Walkman (people remember Walkmans, right?), and created an expectation that information should be accessible on the go. In the 21st century, even more compact forms of transportable information become commercially available; today, the infamous 2TB flash drive is sitting on store shelves (at the 1960s price tag of 1 cent per bit, 2 TB of storage would set you back $160 billion).
Today, most data is stored on a network of servers called “the cloud,” eliminating the need for on-site storage. The cloud leverages the internet to eliminate the need for consumers to physically carry their data with them at all, allowing people to access a nearly limitless amount of data from their cell phones or tablets. This has had, and will continue to have, a profound impact on the way we conceptualize and use data on both a personal and commercial scale.
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-Nick Childs
