As many may remember, early computers were fairly useless by themselves. Personal computers such as the C64, Amiga, Atari and Spectrum did not have any internal storage, some did not even have a drive to accept a disk or tape and required peripherals to load data. As such people frequently found themselves with multiple boxes brimming with hundreds of tapes or floppy disks, ready to be slotted in when needed.
Eventually all PCs had internal storage and a permanent operating system, but removable disks were still the primary method of acquiring and installing software. Floppy disks were improved but eventually gave way to optical disks, starting with CD, then DVD and finally BluRay and HDDVD.
All these disks eventually became obsolete as well, with the advent of cheap non-volatile storage, or the common USB stick on every desk, which is faster and cheaper and better in almost every way.
Use of removable media is in decline however, as software is rarely sold on disks anymore, relying instead on downloading from the internet. The use of USB sticks is now discouraged because of security concerns, and many laptops do not come with optical drives at all now since there is little need or demand.
Last year Micron created the i400 micro SD card, it has 1.5TB of storage and is the size of a fingernail. Compare that to the equivalent stack of 350 DVDs or if you prefer four and a half million 5.25” floppy disks coming in at about 90 tonnes!
Clearly storage has come a long way, and is better than it has ever been. Yet it is still in decline, as who needs a disk when you have the internet?
Ben
Octagon Technology Support Team
