Data and Information

Storing and reusing data is something that has been done forever. At the most microscopic level we store data in our DNA and in our minds. The first information and data that humans purposely passed onto and traded with one another was through spoken word.

People talk to one another and remember this information allowing peoples to transfer information from one person to another and across the globe.

This is a lossy method though. People forget and misremember what others say, so over time ideas get lost and changed.

Written Information Storage

To solve some of these problems people started writing things down. Representing ideas and data as marks on stones and pieces of paper.

This was a way for us to encode data into a stable format. Information no longer required humans to remember and recite it. By knowing the writing system people could store the same information for thousands of years through written text.

Mechanized Data Storage

People figured out that they could not only store information, but they could also reproduce it. By carving the writings backwards into wood blocks ink could be applied to the surface and then the ideas would be replicated on whatever page it was pressed into.

In the 1440s this process became mechanized allowing rapid duplication and dispersal of information. The printing press allowed people to use preencoded selections of letters and symbols and then rearrange these when needed to make books and pages.

Alternative Modes of Data Storage

Words were not the only way to store data though. People also learned to encode audio data in ways like music boxes. A music box is a drum of "sticks" when rotated they hit on different metal bits making differnt noises.

The music box was actually a form of binary data as a spot in the drum could be filled or empty.

People figured out that audio and text was not the only thing you could store. Fabric patterns could also be stored and repeated. A man name jacquard figured out a way to repeatable make differnet cloth patterns using wood blocks.

Jacquard patterning is made from lifting/dropping different strands of string as you make your cloth so each string could be in 2 "states" up or down. To represent this jacquard make plates of wood with holes. If there was a hole this reprsented the string going down. and no hole meant up. His machine would then "read each row of holes on the plate and adjust the thread up or down based on those. By stringing together many different "punch cards", as they would later be called, he was able to store and replicate very complex patterns.

Not Just Looms

These punch cards were not just used for looms though.

People also figured out that these could be used to replicate mathematical calculations. That same process of up or down, present or not present, hole no-hole was the same concept as binary. First people understood that using these punch cards you could store binary numbers which once read back and decoded would be understood.

As computers improved people began understanding that you could encode different things in these. Age, height and weights of a person. Tax records and payment data. Census information and population statistics. People now understood that data could be stored using this binary system.

Computers were soon after developed that could read this data and do calculations to it, making it ever more useful.

Improving on punch cards

Punch cards were just long lines of things saying "here" or "not here" 1 and 0. So pepole figured out an smaller way to represent this was using magnets. Really they figured out that you could magnetize small bits of iron and then that magnet could pull on a "reader" and be read back later. To arrange the "bits" of material they coated it into long strips of plastic. This way each piece would be held apart while still allowing to magnetize and read it.

This worked well and each piece of data could be stored in a much smaller amount of room. Instead of a 4mm hole of a punch card the magnetic bits took up only a quarter of a mm. To read magnetic tape though you had to spool and unspool sections and then rewind it back to the original side when you wanted to use it again in the same direction. Because the tape had to be able bend the density of the data could only go so far and oher methods were being experimented with.

This is where magnetic drums came into use. Instead of a tape strip which rolls and unrolls a single drum could be used so that a completly rigid surface could be used. The rigid surface allowed for much more precise data input and retriveal, making it more robust and last longer and encode more information. Also because the shape of the drum was round it spun in the exact same location meaning that it was much more stable and easier to change location much faster as all data was "exposed" at one time.

Again innovation further improved this by instead using disks. Like drums these kept theere same position in space. but were much thinner so much more compact. Multiple disks could be stacked to expand capacity even further. These types of Hard Disk Drives are still commonly used today for both bulk storage and consumer hardware usage.

Further technological improvements led to solid state technology. As the we went from relays to vaccum tubes to transistors it was found that this tehcnology could be used to store data without any movement. Comparing this to HDDs which still had to rotate their disks using a motor this was a big advantage. Motors could fail over time and vibrations could affect the data integrity as there were individual read and write heads which would physical change the data.

Once transisotrs were discovered people figure dout a special type that could "lock" charge in place. This allowed for data storage that did not have any moving parts meaning it could be faster, more efficient, and take up less space. Again improving the speed and density allowing for massive amounts of data storage in place.

SSDs and HDDs are still both part of the modern technology stack that allows us to store massive amounts of data.