Digital and Optical Storage

Digital and Optical Storage

Abraham Le’i

Course Instructor: Ted Schnetker

IDS804

May 10, 2007

Abstract

Since the inception of computers in the 1940’s, the computer has grown significantly in complexity, both in terms of tasks it can perform and usability. Over the years it has vastly increased the scope of tasks it can perform from simple mathematical calculations to the present-day complex weather forecasting or lab test of nuclear weapons. Today, with the advances in the storage space technologies, humans are able to document all the knowledge acquired over the centuries in a single computer. We are moving from Gigabytes to Terabytes in the personal computer. Now we can store all the movies, music and information we have ever read, seen or listen to on a single desktop.

This journey is long and arduous. The first step was taken in the 1970s with commercialization of the floppy disc to load microcode on IBM computers. Since then corporate needs and personal indulgence has led to the growth from magnetic base to hard drives and optical storage devices. In the 1970s Floppy disk drives were first introduced commercially as a read-only device. They became an