By David Williams

 The Punch Card was first used as an input method for primitive calculating machines in the late 19 th century

 Magnetic Tape was first patented in 1928 however it was not used to record data until 1951 the recording medium was a ½ inch wide thin band of nickel plated bronze and had data rate of 12,800 characters per second (1.5 kilobytes)

The First computer with a hard disc as a standard was the IBM 350 Disc File introduces in 1956 the drive had fifty 24 inch platters with a total capacity of five million characters

 In 1975 the 5.35 inch floppy was born it had a storage capacity of 110 kilobytes however only one side of the floppy was in use so in 1978 the dual side floppy disc drive was created they also increased the storage capacity to 360 kilobytes

 A compact disc (or CD) is an optical disc used to store digital data, originally developed for storing digital audio. A standard compact disc, often known as an audio CD to differentiate it from later variants, stores audio data in a format compliant with the red book standard. And could store 74 minutes of audio

 In 1981 the 3,5” floppy disk was introduced it had the significant advantage of being much better protected with a hard case and a metal cover that slides aside when inserted into the drive. And had the additional benefit of having a rectangular shape that meant it was impossible to insert the disc sideways. They were originally offered in a 360 KB single-sided and a 720 KB double-sided double density format.

 The CD-ROM, an abbreviation for “Compact Disk Read-Only- Memory”, is an optical data storage medium using the same physical format as the audio compact discs. Digital information is encoded at near-microscopic size, allowing a large amount of information to be stored. CDs record binary data as tiny pits (or non-pits) pressed into the lower surface of the plastic disc; a semiconductor laser beam in the player reads these.

 In 1995 the DVD was created. The DVD is the new generation of optical disc technology. DVD is essentially a bigger faster CD that can hold cinema-like video. The DVD has become the most successful consumer electronics product of all time. By 2003 there were over 250 million DVD playback devices world wide

 The Blu-ray Disc is a next- generation optical disc meant for high definition video and high density data storage. Blu-ray gets its name from the shorter wavelength blue laser that in addition to other techniques, allows it to store substantially more data on the same sized disc than DVD. The Blu-ray Disc can hold around 25 GB single-layer and around 50 GB dual-layer

 The Solid State Drive is a data storage device that uses solid-state memory to store data. They are different from HDDs in that they store their data on microchips not spinning discs. Compared to HDDs they are typically less susceptible to physical shock, quieter and have lower access time and latency