Good post by Brian Truskowski (thank you)
As businesses around the globe contend with the incessant, pounding waves of data crashing into their data centers, some may wonder how we reached this point in the first place. While there was a great deal of experimentation going on in the early days of the computer industry, and while there have been a great number of innovations since, it’s fair to say that the digital storage industry as we know it today would not have occurred without an innovation created by a team of IBM engineers 60 years ago this May. The innovation enabled the massive calculating machines to save their results digitally on reels of magnetic tape instead of on punch cards, creating entirely new ways to view and gain insight from, digital information.
To be sure, over the course of time, innovative approaches to earlier inventions have often paved the way for progress. New applications, innovative enhancements, or outright redesigns of earlier inventions pushed many of them into mass production and the mainstream. Thomas Edison, famous for many things, did not, of course, invent the incandescent light bulb. The first successful experiment with the electric light occurred almost 60 years prior to Edison’s innovative use of a vacuum to remove the oxygen from the bulb, as well as a new filament design, to extend the life of the light bulb from a few hours to more than 1,500.
And so it was for the fledgling computer industry of the 1940s and 50s—a time when calculating and processing wasn’t the concern any longer, but rather storing the results of the calculations. During those early years, the only recordable techniques for the massive calculating systems involved “physical media”—hard copy books, paper and punch cards. It was becoming clear that as these systems gained performance their storage solutions were not sustainable.
IBM engineers turned to a newer technology of the day, magnetic tape, for answers. The technology, which had been used to capture audio, held promise for the hulking computing systems, but tape was just not durable enough. When large reels of it were applied for capturing the computer data, the tape drives’ powerful motors, which abruptly started and stopped, easily snapped the tape.
IBM engineers tackled the breakage problem head-on. And on May 21, 1952, when the company released its first production computer, the IBM 701, it also released an accompanying storage system that represented a breakthrough in magnetic tape. The IBM 726 was a 935-pound floor-standing behemoth that solved the breakage problem through the use of a “vacuum column” which created a buffer of loose tape between starts and stops. This U-shaped loop of loose tape allowed the tape to better absorb the extremely fast starts and stops of the system.
The vacuum column innovation was not only a success, but it was adopted by most high-performance tape drive manufacturers, making it one of the most widely used computer technologies of the 20th century. The technology became so prevalent that the image of the start and stop, reel-to-reel tape system, became the iconic, albeit unofficial, image that would symbolize the “computer” for an entire generation in news and entertainment.
To be sure, the challenges of 2012 are not what they were in 1952. Today, game-changing dynamics such as social media, mobile computing, Big Data and regulation are all intersecting to create a digital traffic jam of epic proportions. By some accounts, the amount of information needed to be digitally stored will exceed 8 zettabytes (or, 8 billion terabytes) by 2015. These trends and forecasts are forcing every industry to look at their storage infrastructures more carefully than ever before.
Read on here
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