Historical Computer Engineering - Memory
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Memory

1958: Magnetic tape

History

The father of tape technology is the magnetic sound recording on the wire, which was developed about 1898 by the Dane Valdemar Poulsen.

In the 30's, the tapes were introduced in the U.S.. From 1935, the tapes arrived in Germany on the market. They were from AEG (General-Electric Company) and IG Colours Industry (now BASF) developed. At these time coated paper or magnetic tapes from homogeneous magnetizable material were manufactured.

1952 IBM realized that magnetic tapes can also be used to store data from computers. It has developed the IBM 726 tape drive, which could record 1.4 MB at a data rate of 7.5 kilobytes.

In the 50's and 60's of the 20th Century magnetic tapes were used as volumes of electronic data processing in addition to drum storage for large computers.

As early as 1956, IBM announced the first hard disk in the world, which led to the fall of the tapes as storage for the result. But for archiving data and for audio and video tapes were used for a long time because of their durability, large capacity and the cost per megabyte ratio.