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Charting the History of Data Storage

by Matthew Zuras on December 3, 2009 at 07:30 AM

Flickr user Curtiss Spontelli recently uploaded this wonderful little chart showing the evolution of data storage over the years. It's interesting to visualize how our modern two-terabyte hard drives can hold about a zillion times more than ye olde wax cylinders, and that even Zip disks (which don't seem that archaic to some of us) held only 100 megabytes. How our needs have changed.

While this info-graphic is certainly remarkable for its ability to condense over a century of data storage into a single image, it also makes us feel a little old. The designer chose to begin his history of computerized data with 5.25-inch floppy disks (why not IBM punch cards?) and most of us are old enough to remember when those floppy disks were, in fact, floppy. Ah, sweet youth. We'll now sit and ponder those wondrous times long ago, when we played 'The Oregon Trail' on an Apple II. [From: Flickr, via Buzzfeed]

Tags: data storage, data visualization, DataStorage, DataVisualization, infographic, top

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