Storage Media Evolution History
Exploring the evolution of data storage through physical artifacts
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Spent the afternoon going through a box of old storage media I found in my garage, and it’s like an archaeological dig through the history of personal computing.
Found 5.25-inch floppies, 3.5-inch disks, ZIP drives, CD-ROMs, and even a few magnetic tape cartridges. Each represents a different era of computing with its own constraints and possibilities.
The 5.25-inch floppies are particularly fascinating. 360KB of storage that felt revolutionary at the time. You had to be incredibly selective about what data was worth preserving. Every program, every document had to justify its existence in terms of disk space.
Managed to read some of the 3.5-inch disks using an old USB drive. The software artifacts are like time capsules – early versions of word processors, simple games, and personal documents from the 1990s. The file sizes are tiny by today’s standards but represent hours of work.
The progression of storage density is staggering. From 360KB floppies to 700MB CDs to multi-terabyte SSDs represents a million-fold increase in just a few decades. Yet the fundamental challenges remain the same: durability, cost, and access speed.
What’s striking is how physical these storage media were. You could hold your data, organize it physically, and lose it catastrophically. Modern cloud storage abstracts away the physicality, but also the tangible sense of ownership.
Some of the media has already degraded. Magnetic fields have weakened, optical surfaces have oxidized, and mechanical components have seized. Digital preservation is an ongoing battle against entropy.
The ritual aspects were important too. Loading a program meant physically inserting media, waiting for mechanical processes, and often swapping disks multiple times. The computer demanded patience and physical interaction.
Found some interesting software I’d completely forgotten about – early CAD programs, music composition tools, and educational games. The creativity developers showed working within such tight constraints is inspiring.
Planning to properly archive what’s still readable and document the software for historical preservation purposes.