Hind sight is better than 20/20.  Where did some of our latest tech gadgets come from?  Where are they heading?  In order to understand the future, the past may provide secrets when revisited.  In the upcoming weeks, we’ll be looking at many different pieces of technology.  Some may be nostalgic – but some may also lead to greater ideas when ideas fuse together forming something new not of itself, but because of a new spin on things.

To spin things up, let’s look at a page preserved from Creative Computing, April 1980.  May we present to you, the world’s largest floppy disk drive!

The Past:

Engineers at Common Door, while working on the next version of the PIT computer, stumbled on a revolutionary principle. Cutting through the mathematical jargon and formulae, the breakthrough can be stated simply "that a bigger disk holds more data." The engineers then set out to find out if there is an upper limit to this principle. Computer simulations on the PIT computer indicated that disks would continue to hold more data as their size increased up to diameter of 32,767 millimeters but then the run abruptly blew up. Consequently, the engineers concluded that a physical prototype must be constructed. The photo shows the first prototype with a diameter of 32,768 millimeters (about 107 feet).

When revolving at the standard speed of 78 rpm, the outer edge travels at well over 55 mph. The California Highway Patrol picked this up in a radar trap but a liberal judge gave the engineers at Common Door the go-ahead "as long as you keep it off the road." Experiments with speeds of 30,000 rpm are now being conducted to see what happens when the outer edge exceeds the speed of light (and electrons). A Common Door spokesperson said, "At these speeds we expect some very high data transfer rates."

Common Door expects to release the consumer version of this product at the summer CES. In keeping with the high quality control and extensive testing of other PIT peripherals, Common Door would not promise delivery until "August 1980 at the very latest." Pricing was not announced.

Taken from: http://www.swtpc.com/mholley/Creative_Computing/Large_Disk.htm

Gone the way of the floppy disc include other magnetic storage media such as Iomega Zip disks (remember those during the Windows 3.11 days?) where it would fit 100MB which would be as large as some people’s hard drives, and later the Jazz which upped the potentials to 1GB.  Originally released to interface with the parallel port, the Zip drive introduced a new era of mobile convenience where one could move a large amount of data (based on yesterday’s standards) freely.

The Present:

Magnetic heads?  Only thing I know left that acts like a floppy still that uses magnets happens to be the hard disk drive (HDD).  Found in laptops, desktops, servers, and music players, the HDD has developed into faster and vastly larger carriers of information.  From yesterday’s floppy that spun at a mere 78 rpms, HDDs usually will spin at speeds of 4,200, 5,400, 7,200, and 10,000 rpms ranging from your slower laptop HDDs all the way of the lightning fast "Raptor” HDDs that are available in the consumer market. HDDs now go up to 2TB capacities and is sure to continue to grow to meet the demand for storage in our daily lives to hold all our music, videos, photos, and more.

The Future:

For  now, HDDs are assured to continue to live as they provide high capacity storage at affordable prices (probably a very long while too!).  People are shying away now though from using the traditional HDD for holding operating systems (boot drives) as with the larger sizes the seek times will increase.  The faster alternative for these boot drives is the use of solid state drives (SSD).  Not only faster because of no spin-up time, the SSD provides also for power savings as there are no moving parts.  Another benefit of the lack of moving parts includes data security should the drive suffer a physical impact from a drop. With SSDs, defragmentation also becomes a thing of the past.  Coming in SATA and now PCI-E flavors.  These smaller more expensive storage devices are sure to be the wave of the future and prices are sure to drop with continued market adoption. 

Perhaps sometime in the next decade or so, we may see the start of biotechnology for storage.  Certainly something out of Star Trek with the use of “bio gel packs” – but hey, much of science fiction really isn’t fiction anymore.  Dare to dream?  Dreams are the foundation of reality just as necessity is the mother of invention.  Until next time – this is TJ with Just Another Mobile Monday’s new series – “RetroVision”.