In a new world record, scientists at IBM have captured 330 terabytes of uncompressed data — or the equivalent of 330 million books — into a cartridge that can fit into the palm of your hand. The record of 201 gigabits per square inch on prototype sputtered magnetic tape is more than 20 times the areal density currently used in commercial tape drives. Areal recording density is the amount of information that can be stored on a given area of surface.
Tape drives were invented over 60 years ago and were traditionally used for archiving tax documents and health care records. IBM’s first tape unit used reels of half-inch-wide tape that could only hold about 2 megabytes.
I recall getting a 10 MB disk for our Digital PDP-11 in around 1981. This was in Saudi Arabia and I was on the phone to our IT guy in Buffalo NY to install this thing as he talked me through it. A good 90 minutes at whatever the international rates were at the time. But my over-riding memory is how small this thing was: I couldn't believe that this tiny disk - about 14 inches diameter and an inch thick - could hold a whole 10 MB of data. I can still remember the password I set up that day 36 years ago. I wish I could remember the password I set up last week for my Home Depot account.
ex-khobar Andy wrote:I can still remember the password I set up that day 36 years ago. I wish I could remember the password I set up last week for my Home Depot account.
I think that's far enough back that it be OK to reuse it.
A friend of Doc's, one of only two B-29 bombers still flying.
30 years ago I was working for the DuPont company and once a year all files were purged and those to be saved were transferred to computer tape. The tape was known to be unstable, but such archiving meet the legal requirements for saving records. The company assumed that 10% of the data would be randomly lost every ten years. The data I was concerned about was by federal regulation to be saved for 30 years, plus the term of employment of every individual who had worked with the particular chemicals. Thus, if a newly hired person worked with something which many years later was discovered to possibly cause harm to people working with it, the 'archived' records were hoped to be too deteriorated to be useful in a court case.
A propos of this thread, there is an interesting article in today's NYT about the team of NASA engineers who put Voyagers I and II into play 40 years ago and who are still working on it. Well worth a read.