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Hard Drive Evolution - College Essay

Hard Drive Evolution

Even before the first commercial computers appeared in 1951, "mass" storage, although minuscule by today's standards, was a necessity. As early as the mid-1800s, punch cards were used to provide input to early calculators and other machines. The 1940s ushered in the decade when vacuum tubes were used for storage until, finally, tape drives started to replace punch cards in the early 1950s. Only a couple of years later, magnetic drums appeared on the scene. In 1957, the first hard drive was introduced as a component of IBM's RAMAC 350. It required 50 24-inch disks to store five megabytes of data and cost roughly $35,000.
For years, hard disk drives were confined to mainframe and ...

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the time, a storage capacity of 10 MB was considered too large for a so-called "personal" computer.
The first PCs used removable floppy disks as storage devices almost exclusively. The term "floppy" accurately fit the earliest 8-inch PC diskettes and the 5.25-inch diskettes that succeeded them. The inner disk that holds the data usually is made of Mylar and coated with a magnetic oxide, and the outer, plastic cover, bends easily. The inner disk of today’s smaller, 3.5-inch floppies is similarly constructed, but they are housed in a rigid plastic case, which is much more durable than the flexible covering on the larger diskettes.
With the introduction of the IBM PC/XT in 1983, hard disk drives also became a standard component of most personal computers. The descriptor "hard" is used because the inner disks that hold data in a hard drive are made of an aluminum alloy. These disks, called platters, are coated with a much-improved magnetic material and last much longer than a ...

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PAPER DETAILS

Added: 8/17/2004 11:31:07 AM
Category: Science & Nature
Type: Premium Paper
Words: 988
Pages: 4

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