Comments on: The History of Computer Data Storage, in Pictures

By: Alauddin

Alauddin — Tue, 10 Mar 2020 07:43:57 +0000

Very nice article. I enjoyed much. Thank you.

By: Lionhart

Lionhart — Thu, 20 Feb 2020 02:55:55 +0000

While most people only heard them by putting them into an audio player, technically you are wrong. Some models of the Commodore Data Cassette, such as the Australian model, had a volume dial on them, and you COULD hear the sound while loading if you wished on these.

By: Diane

Diane — Fri, 26 Jul 2019 20:16:20 +0000

In reply to CJ Jackson. My dad was a Mechanical engineer there. What office did he work out of?

By: J. Chris Hausler

J. Chris Hausler — Sun, 17 Jul 2016 18:51:31 +0000

Don’t forget the magnetic card systems of the 1960’s. RCA had their RACE (random access card equipment) and NCR had their CRAM (card random access memory). Then there was the infamous (within IBM to this day) Datacell. In my collection of magnetic media I once used I have a couple of RCA RACE cards and two complete IBM Datacells.

By: seth

seth — Mon, 20 Jun 2016 15:19:46 +0000

cool timeline

By: Larry Press

Larry Press — Mon, 27 Apr 2015 13:51:36 +0000

In reply to Pingdom. TD stood for "transmitter-distributor".

By: Larry Press

Larry Press — Mon, 27 Apr 2015 13:50:30 +0000

If you are willing to include program storage as well as data storage, how about the plugboards we used to program unit record machines? They were also used as supplementary storage in computers like the 305 RAMAC shown above.

By: Marsa

Marsa — Thu, 23 Jan 2014 00:25:27 +0000

Can anyone tell me what the acronym TD stands for in TD machines, having to do with the old paper-tape transmission of computer information back in the early 1970s. Thanks.

By: jimfbailey

jimfbailey — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 02:36:06 +0000

In reply to Rusty. I worked on an IBM air defense computer system starting in '61. 56,000 vacuum tubes, 2500 miles of wire, 1 million semiconductor diodes. We used punched cards, magnetic tape, magnetic drum memory, and the system had 65,536 words of 32-bit core memory. I have been in the computer industry since then and have lots of great memories of the changes in technology over the years.

By: mel sage

mel sage — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 19:59:28 +0000

In reply to Eric Sobocinski.

The Atari cassette recorder was stereo, one track was intended for audio and fed to the TV speaker, the other was for data. Most commercial games were recorded in mono, or used the audio track for anti tape-to-tape copy protection exploiting head alignment errors, and I seem to recall that the Atari itself recorded data over both tracks.

The chip that decoded the tones to data had no reset pin, and the OS used it in whatever state it powered up in, so data transfer wasn’t as reliable as it should have been. It was possible to reset the chip by manipulating some of its registers, I wrote a program that did that and could load data at much higher speed, although I could never get the Atari to reliably save above 1407 baud, other than by manipulating tape speed.