Digital And Optical Storage
...Abstract
Since the inception of computers in the 1940's, the computer has grown significantly in complexity, both in terms of tasks it can perform and usability. Over the years it has vastly increased the scope of tasks it can perform from simple mathematical calculations to the present-day complex weather forecasting or lab test of nuclear weapons. Today, with the advances in the storage space technologies, humans are able to document all the knowledge acquired over the centuries in a single computer. We are moving from Gigabytes to Terabytes in the personal computer. Now we can store all the movies, music and information we have ever read, seen or listen to on a single desktop.
This journey is long and arduous. The first step was taken in the 1970s with commercialization of the floppy disc to load microcode on IBM computers. Since then corporate needs and personal indulgence has led to the growth from magnetic base to hard drives and optical storage devices. In the 1970s Floppy disk drives were first introduced commercially as a read-only device. They became an instant hit in the industry as they could hold large IBM mainframe computer systems' microcode and diagnostics. They were followed by hard drives, which became an integral part of the personal computer's growth story. With the growth of media in homes, devices that could better cater to entertainment storage were developed. This lead to the growth of optical storage, starting with the compact disc, which can hold 650 MB, to the most current Blue-Ray technology, which can store at the least 25 GB of data.
Introduction
Since its inception in the 1940s, the computer has significantly grown in complexity both in terms of tasks it can perform and usability. Over the years it has vastly increased the scope of tasks it can perform from simple mathematical calculations to the present-day complex...
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