2mya to 1900s
In this time span the shift from one external memory device to another was based on invention of new material. Invention of new better materials made the invention of better memory devices,i.e. greater storage capacity, better information transfer and better retrieval among other things like robustness, longevity possible.
Hunter gatherer society(2mya)
Initially during the dawn of civilization like every other animal humans were concerned with fulfilling their basic needs food and protection from predators(shelter). Gathering food, hunting or otherwise took most part of the day. In such an environment the only information they were in possession of was survival skills and these were passed on orally down the generations. owing to the continual hardship and nomadic life style, communities were small, everyone knew everyone else so one could orally pass on information. there was no need for external memory devices as there was no much information to store. for marking trails and primitive maps stone markings served the purpose. Most of the information transfer took place orally.
Agriculture.(10000+bc)
With the invention of agriculture, people began living in permanent settlements they grew their own food, the hardships associated with nomadic lifestyle were gone and the population expanded.
This led to two things.
-The people did not have to spend the whole day searching for food. They had ample time for other things they started observing their surroundings and gathering information. Also for good yield they had to keep track of the seasons, for better hunting, migrating seasons of animals. There was too much information for a person to remember so they used stone and clay tablets to record these.
-As the population expanded oral communication with all the people became difficult and stone and wax tablets were used to transfer information efficiently.
Clay tablets were used in Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC. The calamus, an instrument in the form of a triangle, was used to make characters in moist clay. The tablets were fired to dry them out.
Around 3000 bc papyrus was used for storing information. It was made from the bark of the papyrus plant.
Papyrus had the advantage of being relatively cheap and easy to produce, but it was fragile and susceptible to both moisture and excessive dryness.
Invention of paper(105 AD)
It was the first major revolution in the history of external memory devices. Paper was invented by the Chinese by 105 AD during the Han Dynasty. It was cheap, easy to produce easy to write on, store and transport and its effect was universal. People all over the world used books newspapers magazines periodicals to store information and communicate. It ruled the market for another 1800 years as the major means for external storage.
Till this time it was possible to manually read the recorded data. But from this point on the memory devices were such that they recorded the information in a different format. This required a machine to record and to translate.
Mechanical storage
Punch tape(1869)
Herman Hollerith invented the recording of data on a medium that could then be read by a machine, developing punched card data processing technology for the 1890 US census. This was an important step in memory devices development. He founded the Tabulating Machine Company (1896) which was one of four companies that merged to form Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation (CTR), later renamed IBM. IBM manufactured and marketed a variety of unit record machines for creating, sorting, and tabulating punched cards, even after expanding into electronic computers in the late 1950s. IBM developed punched card technology into a powerful tool for business data-processing and produced an extensive line of general purpose unit record machines. By 1950, the IBM card and IBM unit record machines had become ubiquitous in industry and government.
Although punch cards had been used since the 1890’s to store and tabulate data, the 1960’s brought a new, creative use of the medium. The punch card itself – as in, its physical form and its transference from one person to another – became an integral part of the information system process. Since each card could store 80 bytes of data, and writing that data required nothing more than a simple punch machine, “computerized data” could originate anywhere and transfer to whomever, all without the need for an expensive computer. One after another, organizations added punch cards to their regular paper processes. The telephone company mailed a punch card along with the bill. Department stores used them as price tags, having cashiers return them to data processing when items sold. Utility company equipped service technicians with special clipboards that punched holes in their report cards.
Impact:
-While punched cards have not been widely used for a generation, the impact was so great for most of the 20th century that they still appear from time to time in popular culture.
- Even the phrase printed on nearly every punch card – Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate – had become a cultural phenomenon, influencing popular music and inspiring a movie, two books, and a murder mystery of the same title (but otherwise, unrelated).
-Artist and architect Maya Lin in 2004 designed a controversial public art installation at Ohio University, titled "Input", that looks like a punched card from the air.
-The Red McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin has artistic representations of punched cards decorating its exterior walls.
-At the University of Wisconsin - Madison, the exterior windows of the Engineering Research Building were modeled after a punched card layout, during its construction in 1966.
-In the Simpsons episode Much Apu About Nothing, Apu showed Bart his Ph.D. thesis, the world's first computer tic-tac-toe game, stored in a box full of punched cards.
-In the 1964-65 Free Speech Movement punched cards became a metaphor... symbol of the 'system' — first the registration system and then bureaucratic systems more generally ... a symbol of alienation ... Punched cards were the symbol of information machines, and so they became the symbolic point of attack. Punched cards, used for class registration, were first and foremost a symbol of uniformity. .... A student might feel 'he is one of out of 27,500 IBM cards' ... The president of the Undergraduate Association criticized the University as 'a machine ... IBM pattern of education.'... Robert Blaumer explicated the symbolism: he referred to the 'sense of impersonality... symbolized by the IBM technology.'... -Steven Lubar.
During the 1960s, the punched card was gradually replaced as the primary means for data storage by magnetic tape, as better, more capable computers became available. Punched cards were still commonly used for data entry and programming until the mid-1970s when the combination of lower cost magnetic disk storage, and affordable interactive terminals on less expensive minicomputers made punched cards obsolete for this role as well
Magnetic storage Tape drive(1951)
The first tape drive UNISERVO was manufactured by Remington Rand, an American business machines manufacturer in 1952. The UNISERVO tape drive was the primary I/O device on the UNIVAC I computer. it was the first tape drive for a commercially sold computer. It had a capacity of 224 Kb.
A tape drive is a data storage device that reads and performs digital recording, writes data on a magnetic tape. Magnetic tape data storage is typically used for offline, archival data storage. Tape media generally has a favorable unit cost and long archival stability.
-A tape drive provides sequential access storage, unlike a disk drive, which provides random access storage. A disk drive read/write head can move to any position on the disk in a few milliseconds, but a tape drive must physically wind tape between reels to read any one particular piece of data.
For sequential access once the tape is positioned, however, tape drives can stream data very fast. For example, as of 2010 Linear-tape open (LTO) supported continuous data transfer rates of up to 140 MB/s, comparable to hard disk drives.
-The most important reason for the usage of the tape drive is cost effectiveness. It is much cheaper than the other storage media. Benefit of tape media is that if you make the tape long enough, you theoretically have an unlimited amount of storage space
Design products based on tape drives
LP record(1948)
The LP, or long-playing microgroove record, is a format for phonograph records, an analog sound storage medium. Introduced by Columbia Records in 1948, it was soon adopted as a new standard by the entire record industry. Apart from relatively minor refinements and the important later addition of stereophonic sound capability, it has remained the standard format for vinyl "albums" up to the present.
The prototype of the LP was the soundtrack disc used by the Vitaphone motion picture sound system, developed by Western Electric and introduced in 1926. The maximum playing time of each side of a conventional 12-inch (30 cm) 78 rpm disc, slightly less than five minutes, was not acceptable. The disc had to play continuously for at least 11 minutes, long enough to accompany a full 1000-foot reel of 35 mm film projected at 24 frames per second. The disc diameter was increased to 16 inches (40 cm) and the speed was reduced to 33⅓ revolutions per minute.
When the LP was introduced in 1948, the 78 was the conventional format for phonograph records. By 1952, 78s accounted for slightly more than half of the units sold in the United States, and just under half of the dollar sales. The 45, oriented toward the single song, accounted for 30.2% of unit sales and 26.5% of dollar sales. The LP represented 16.7% of unit sales and 26.2% of dollar sales.
Compact cassetes
The Compact Cassette, often referred to as audio cassette, cassette tape, cassette, or simply tape, is a magnetic tape sound recording format. In 1962 Philips invented the compact audio cassette medium for audio storage, introducing it in Europe in August 1963.
The mass production of compact audio cassettes began in 1964 in Hannover, Germany. During the 1980s, the cassette's popularity grew further as a result of portable pocket recorders and high-fidelity ("hi-fi") players, such as Sony's Walkman. They were used for audio, broadcasting, home studio, home dubbing, institutional duplication, data storage.
Impact
Apart from the purely technological advances cassettes brought, they also served as catalysts for social change. Their durability and ease of copying helped bring underground rock and punk music behind the Iron Curtain, creating a foothold for Western culture among the younger generations. For similar reasons, cassettes became popular in developing nations.
One of the most famous political uses of cassette tapes was the dissemination of sermons by the Ayatollah Khomeini throughout Iran before the 1979 Iranian Revolution, in which Khomeini urged the overthrow of the regime of the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
In 1970s India, they were blamed for bringing unwanted secular influences into traditionally religious areas. Cassette technology was a booming market for pop music in India, drawing criticism from conservatives while at the same time creating a huge market for legitimate recording companies as well as pirated tapes. In some countries, particularly in the developing countries, cassettes remain the dominant medium for purchasing and listening to music.
Mail Art Movement:
Mail art is a worldwide cultural movement that began in the early 1960s and involves sending visual art (but also music, sound art, poetry, etc.) through the international postal system.
Cassette culture
An offshoot of the mail art movement. Cassette culture, or the cassette underground, refers to the practices surrounding amateur production and distribution of recorded music that emerged in the late 1970s via home-made audio cassettes . It is characterized by the adoption of home-recording by independent artists, and involvement in ad-hoc self-distribution and promotion networks - primarily conducted through mail. The development of the cassette tape recording format was important - the improvement of tape formulations and availability of sophisticated cassette decks in the late 1970s allowed participants produce high-quality copies of their music inexpensively.
Packaging design
The packaging of cassette releases, whilst sometimes amateurish, was also an aspect of the format in which a high degree of creativity and originality could be found. For the most part packaging relied on traditional plastic shells with a photocopied "J-card" insert. The Chocolate Monk-released album "Anusol" by the A Band, came packaged with a "suppository" unique to each copy - one of which was a used condom wrapped in tissue. BWCD released a cassette by Japanese noise artist Aube that came tied to a blue plastic ashtray shaped like a fish. EEtapes of Belgium release of This Window's (UK) "Extraction 2" was packaged with an X-ray of a broken limb in 1995. The Barry Douglas Lamb album "Ludi Funebres" had the cassette box buried in some earth contained in a larger outer tin and covered in leaves.
Tape drives have yet to reach their maximum capacity.
In 2011, Fujifilm and IBM announced that they had managed to record 29.5 billion bits per square inch with magnetic tape media developed using the BaFe particles and nanotechnologies allowing for an uncompressed tape drive of 35TB
Floppy disks
A floppy disk is a disk storage medium composed of a disk of thin and flexible magnetic storage medium, sealed in a rectangular plastic carrier lined with fabric that removes dust particles. They are read and written by a floppy disk drive (FDD).
In 1971, IBM introduced the first "floppy disk"
A floppy disk is a disk storage medium composed of a disk of thin and flexible magnetic storage medium, sealed in a rectangular plastic carrier
The floppy disk was the first truly portable form of information storage for computers.
Almost as soon as it was invented, the floppy disk made punch cards obsolete - they were just so portable, reliable, and easy to use. Floppy disks, initially as 8-inch (200mm) media and later in 5.25-inch (133mm) and 3.5-inch (89mm) sizes, were a ubiquitous form of data storage and exchange from the mid-1970s well into the first decade of the 21st century. loppy disks became ubiquitous in the 1980s and 1990s in their use with personal computers and home computers to distribute software, transfer data, and create backups. Before hard disks became affordable, floppy disks were often used to store a computer's operating system (OS). Most home computers had a primary OS and BASIC stored as ROM, with the option of loading a more advanced disk operating system from a floppy disk.
The 31⁄2-inch floppy's design has been lauded by HCI expert Donald Norman:
"A simple example of a good design is the 3½-inch magnetic diskette for computers, a small circle of "floppy" magnetic material encased in hard plastic. Earlier types of floppy disks did not have this plastic case, which protects the magnetic material from abuse and damage. A sliding metal cover protects the delicate magnetic surface when the diskette is not in use and automatically opens when the diskette is inserted into the computer. The diskette has a square shape: there are apparently eight possible ways to insert it into the machine, only one of which is correct. What happens if I do it wrong? I try inserting the disk sideways. Ah, the designer thought of that. A little study shows that the case really isn't square: it's rectangular, so you can't insert a longer side. I try backward. The diskette goes in only part of the way. Small protrusions, indentations, and cutouts, prevent the diskette from being inserted backward or upside down: of the eight ways one might try to insert the diskette, only one is correct, and only that one will fit. An excellent design."
A floppy disk is used to store basic Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. Limited storage capabilities mean graphics-heavy PowerPoint presentations, photos and music clips cannot be stored.
Floppy disks are still inexpensive and lightweight portable devices and can be carried from place to place easily. Many people still use floppy disks to store smaller files, including confidential matter such as family history records, personal medical records and other important Word documents. A floppy disk can only store 1.44MB of data, while 32GB USB flash drives can back up photos, videos and graphics-rich documents. Sony, Samsung, Bytecc and other manufacturers make traditional as well as new-generation external USB-connected floppy drives.
Impact
For more than two decades, the floppy disk was the primary external writable storage device used. Most computing environments before the 1990s were non-networked and floppy disks were the primary means of transferring data between computers, a method known informally as sneakernet. Unlike hard disks, floppy disks are handled and seen; even a novice user can identify a floppy disk. Because of these factors, a picture of a 31⁄2" floppy disk has become a metaphor for saving data. The floppy disk symbol is still used by software on user interface elements related to saving files, such as the release of Microsoft Office 2010, even though such disks are increasingly obsolete.
Apple introduced the iMac in 1998 with a CD-ROM drive but no floppy drive; this made USB-connected floppy drives popular accessories as the iMac came without any writeable removable media device. Then, manufacturers and retailers progressively reduced the availability floppy drives and disks; widespread support for USB flash drives and BIOS boot support helped them.On 29 January 2007, PC World stated that only 2% of the computers they sold contained built-in floppy disk drives; once present stocks were exhausted, no more standard floppies would be sold.
Optical Memory devices
Compact disk(1976)
The Compact Disc (also known as a CD) is an optical disc used to store digital data. It was originally developed to store and playback sound recordings exclusively, but later expanded to encompass data storage. the CD was planned to be the successor of the gramophone record for playing music, rather than primarily as a data storage medium. From its origins as a musical format, CDs have grown to encompass other applications.
Sony first publicly demonstrated an optical digital audio disc in September 1976.Later in 1979, Sony and Philips Consumer Electronics (Philips) set up a joint task force of engineers to design a new digital audio disc. Led by Kees Schouhamer Immink and Toshitada Doi, the research pushed forward laser and optical disc technology that began independently by Philips and Sony in 1977 and 1975, respectively. After a year of experimentation and discussion, the taskforce produced the Red Book, the Compact Disc standard. However, the compact disk did not become popular until it was mass manufactured by Philips in 1980. CD-ROMs and CD-Rs remain widely used technologies in the computer industry. The CD and its extensions are successful: in 2004, worldwide sales of CD audio, CD-ROM, and CD-R reached about 30 billion discs. By 2007, 200 billion CDs had been sold worldwide. In June 1985, the computer readable CD-ROM (read-only memory) and, in 1990, CD-Recordable were introduced, also developed by both Sony and Philips. The CD's compact format has largely replaced the audio cassette player in new automobile applications, and recordable CDs are an alternative to tape for recording music and copying music albums without defects introduced in compression used in other digital recording methods.
DVD(1995)
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions.DVD uses 650nm wavelength laser diode light as opposed to 780nm for CD. This permits a smaller pit to be etched on the media surface compared to CDs (0.74µm for DVD versus 1.6µm for CD), allowing in part for DVD's increased storage capacity.
Pre-recorded DVDs are mass-produced using molding machines that physically stamp data onto the DVD. Such discs are known as DVD-ROM, because data can only be read and not written nor erased. Blank recordable DVDs (DVD-R and DVD+R) can be recorded once using optical disc recording technologies and supported by optical disc drives and DVD recorders and then function as a DVD-ROM. Rewritable DVDs (DVD-RW, DVD+RW, and DVD-RAM) can be recorded and erased multiple times.
Design:
As a movie delivery medium:DVD was adopted by movie and home entertainment distributors to replace the ubiquitous VHS tape as the primary means of distributing films to consumers in the home entertainment marketplace. DVD was chosen for its superior ability to reproduce moving pictures and sound, for its superior durability, and for its interactivity. Interactivity had proven to be a feature which consumers, especially collectors, favored when the movie studios had released their films on LaserDisc. When the price point for a LaserDisc at approximately $100 per disc moved to $20 per disc at retail, this luxury feature became available for mass consumption.
As an interactive medium DVD as a format had two qualities at the time that were not available in any other interactive medium: Enough capacity and speed to provide high quality, full motion video and sound, and low cost delivery mechanism provided by consumer products retailers who quickly moved to sell their players for under $200 and eventually for under $50 at retail. In addition, the medium itself was small enough and light enough to mail using general first class postage. Almost overnight, this created a new business opportunity and model for business innovators like Netflix to re-invent the home entertainment distribution model. It also opened up the opportunity for business and product information to be inexpensively provided on full motion video through direct mail.
Solid state memory devices
Flash drives
Memory cards(1990)
A memory card or flash card is an electronic flash memory data storage device used for storing digital information. They are commonly used in many electronic devices, including digital cameras, mobile phones, laptop computers, MP3 players, and video game consoles . They are small, re-record able, and able to retain data without power.
PC Cards (PCMCIA) were among first commercial memory card formats (type I cards) to come out in the 1990s, but are now mainly used in industrial applications and to connect I/O devices such as modems.the memory card market was highly fragmented until 2010 when micro-SD came to dominate new high-end phones and tablet computers.
Game consoles originally used proprietary solid-state memory cards to store the game program and, in some cases, save player progress. In newer home consoles, read-only optical discs have replaced these custom memory cards for storing the game program, resulting in the need for separate memory cards specifically made to save player progress. These memory cards have also been largely superseded by hard drive storage, internal memory and generic storage devices/cards.
USB flash drives(2000)
A USB flash drive is a data storage device that consists of flash memory with an integrated Universal Serial Bus (USB) interface. USB flash drives are typically removable and rewritable, and physically much smaller than a floppy disk. Most weigh less than 30g (1oz).USB flash drives are often used for the same purposes for which floppy disks or CD-ROMs were used. They are smaller, faster, have thousands of times more capacity, and are more durable and reliable because they have no moving parts. Until approximately 2005, most desktop and laptop computers were supplied with floppy disk drives, but floppy disk drives have been abandoned in favor of USB ports.
-USB Flash drives use the USB mass storage standard, supported natively by modern operating systems such as Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, and other Unix-like systems.
-Data stored on flash drives is impervious to scratches and dust, and flash drives are mechanically very robust making them suitable for transporting data from place to place and keeping it readily at hand. Most personal computers support USB as of 2010.
-Flash drives also store data densely compared to many removable media. In mid-2009, 256 GB drives became available, with the ability to hold many times more data than a DVD or even a Blu-ray disc.
-Compared to hard drives, flash drives use little power, have no fragile moving parts, and for most capacities are small and light.
-Flash drives implement the USB mass storage device class so that most modern operating systems can read and write to them without installing device drivers. The flash drives present a simple block-structured logical unit to the host operating system, hiding the individual complex implementation details of the various underlying flash memory devices. The operating system can use any file system or block addressing scheme. -Some computers can boot up from flash drives.
-Specially manufactured flash drives are available that have a tough rubber or metal casing designed to be waterproof and virtually "unbreakable". These flash drives retain their memory after being submerged in water, and even through a machine wash. Leaving such a flash drive out to dry completely before allowing current to run through it has been known to result in a working drive with no future problems.
Size and style of packaging
Flash drives come in various, sometimes bulky or novelty, shapes and sizes. Some manufacturers differentiate their products by using elaborate housings, which are often bulky and make the drive difficult to connect to the USB port. Because the USB port connectors on a computer housing are often closely spaced, plugging a flash drive into a USB port may block an adjacent port. Such devices may only carry the USB logo if sold with a separate extension cable.
USB flash drives have been integrated into other commonly carried items such as watches, pens, and even the Swiss Army Knife; others have been fitted with novelty cases such as toy cars or LEGO bricks. The small size, robustness and cheapness of USB flash drives make them an increasingly popular peripheral for case modding.
Heavy or bulky flash drive packaging can make for unreliable operation when plugged directly into a USB port; this can be relieved by a USB extension cable. Such cables are USB-compatible but do not conform to the USB standard.
Uses
The most common use of flash drives is to transport and store personal files such as documents, pictures and videos. Individuals also store medical alert information on MedicTag flash drives for use in emergencies and for disaster preparation.
As application carriers: Flash drives are used to carry applications that run on the host computer without requiring installation. While any standalone application can in principle be used this way, many programs store data, configuration information, etc. on the hard drive and registry of the host computer
Brand and product promotion: The availability of inexpensive flash drives has enabled them to be used for promotional and marketing purposes, particularly within technical and computer-industry circles (e.g. technology trade shows). They may be given away for free, sold at less than wholesale price, or included as a bonus with another purchased product.
Usually, such drives will be custom-stamped with a company's logo, as a form of advertising to increase mind share and brand awareness. The drive may be a blank drive, or preloaded with graphics, documentation, web links, Flash animation or other multimedia, and free or demonstration software.
computer forensics, booting operating systems, audio players, music storage and marketing, arcade, backup are some of the other uses of usb drives.
Advertising
Album cover design
An album cover is the front of the packaging of a commercially released audio recording product, or album. The term can refer to either the printed cardboard covers typically used to package sets of 10" and 12" 78 rpm records, single and sets of 12" LPs, sets of 45 rpm records (either in several connected sleeves or a box), or the front-facing panel of a CD package.
Around 1910, 78 rpm records replaced phonograph cylinder as the medium for recorded sound. The 78 rpm records were issued in both 10" and 12" diameter sizes and were usually sold separately, in brown paper or cardboard sleeves that were sometimes plain and sometimes printed to show the producer or the retailer's name. Generally the sleeves had a circular cutout allowing the record label to be seen. Records could be laid on a shelf horizontally or stood upright on an edge, but because of their fragility, many broke in storage.
Beginning in the 1920s, bound collections of empty sleeves with a plain paperboard or leather cover, similar to a photograph album, were sold as "record albums" that customers could use to store their records. The covers of these bound books were wider and taller than the records inside, allowing the record album to be placed on a shelf upright, like a book, suspending the fragile records above the shelf and protecting them.
In 1938, Columbia records hired Alex Steinweiss as its first art director. He is credited with inventing the concept of album covers and cover art, replacing plain covers used before. Some featured reproductions of classic art while others utilized original designs.
Under the influence of designers like Bob Cato who at various stages in his long music career was vice president of creative services at both Columbia Records and United Artists, album covers became renowned for being a marketing tool and an expression of artistic intent. The importance of cover design was such that some artists specialised or gained fame through their work, notably the design team Hipgnosis (through their work on Pink Floyd albums amongst others) and Roger Dean famous for his Yes and Greeaslade covers, Cal Schankel for Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica and Frank Zappa's We're only in it for the money. A number of record covers have also used images licensed (or borrowed from the public domain) from artists of bygone eras.
The album cover is a component of the over all packaging of an album. Especially in the case of vinyl records with cardboard sleeves, these packages are prone to wear and tear, although wear and tear does often take place to some degree on covers contained within plastic cases. Besides the practicalities of identifying specific records, album covers serve the purpose of advertising the musical contents on the LP, through the use of graphic design, photography, and/or illustration. An album cover normally has the artist's name, sometimes in logo form; and the album title.
Copy right protection and security issues
Copyright infringement is the unauthorized or prohibited use of works under copyright, infringing the copyright holder's exclusive rights, such as the right to reproduce or perform the copyrighted work, or to make derivative works.
The advent of digital media and analog/digital conversion technologies, especially those that are usable on mass-market general-purpose personal computers, has vastly increased the concerns of copyright-dependent individuals and organizations,While analog media inevitably loses quality with each copy generation, and in some cases even during normal use, digital media files may be duplicated an unlimited number of times with no degradation in the quality of subsequent copies. The advent of personal computers as household appliances has made it convenient for consumers to convert media (which may or may not be copyrighted) originally in a physical/analog form or a broadcast form into a universal, digital form (this process is called ripping) for location- or time shifting. This, combined with the Internet and popular file sharing tools, has made unauthorized distribution of copies of copyrighted digital media (digital piracy) much easier.
The rise of file sharing and "piracy" has prompted many copyright holders to display notices on DVD packaging or displayed on screen when the content is played that warn consumers of the illegality of certain uses of the DVD. It is commonplace to include a 90 second advert warning that most forms of copying the contents are illegal. Many DVDs prevent skipping past or fast-forwarding through this warning.
As highly portable media, USB flash drives are easily lost or stolen. All USB flash drives can have their contents encrypted using third party disk encryption software, which can often be run directly from the USB drive without installation (for example, FreeOTFE) although some, such as TrueCrypt, require the user to have administrative rights on every computer it's run on.
Flash drives may present a significant security challenge for some organizations. Their small size and ease of use allows unsupervised visitors or employees to store and smuggle out confidential data with little chance of detection. Both corporate and public computers are vulnerable to attackers connecting a flash drive to a free USB port and using malicious software such as keyboard loggers or packet sniffers.
For computers set up to be bootable from a USB drive it is possible to use a flash drive containing a bootable portable operating system to access the files of a computer even if the computer is password protected. The password can then be changed; or it may be possible to crack the password with a password cracking program, and gain full control over the computer. Encrypting files provides considerable protection against this type of attack.
USB flash drives may also be used deliberately or unwittingly to transfer malware and autorun worms onto a network.
CD/DVD copy protection is a blanket term for various methods of copy protection for CDs and DVDs. Such methods include DRM, CD-checks, Dummy Files, illegal tables of contents, over-sizing or over-burning the CD, physical errors, and bad sectors. Many protection schemes rely on breaking compliance with CD and DVD standards, leading to playback problems on some devices.
Planned obsolescence
Planned obsolescence in industrial design is a policy of deliberately planning or designing a product with a limited useful life, so it will become obsolete or nonfunctional after a certain period of time. Planned obsolescence has potential benefits for a producer because to obtain continuing use of the product the consumer is under pressure to purchase again, whether from the same manufacturer (a replacement part or a newer model), or from a competitor which might also rely on planned obsolescence.
Planned obsolescence is made more likely by making the cost of repairs comparable to the replacement cost, or by refusing to provide service or parts any longer. A product might even never have been serviceable. Creating new lines of products that do not interoperate with older products can also make an older model quickly obsolete, forcing replacement. Examples include change of formats and peripheral devices in computers, change of formats in home audio recordings and movies (records to tapes to CDs and VHS Video to DVDs to Blu-ray).
Designers
James Russell
Russell was born in Bremerton, Washington in 1931. At age six, he invented a remote-control battleship, with a storage chamber for his lunch. Russell went on to earn a BA in Physics from Reed College in Portland in 1953. Afterward, he went to work as a Physicist in General Electric's nearby labs in Richland, Washington. At GE, Russell initiated many experimental instrumentation projects. He was among the first to use a color TV screen and keyboard as the sole interface between computer and operator; and he designed and built the first electron beam welder. Like many audiophiles of the time, he was continually frustrated by the wear and tear suffered by his vinyl phonograph records. He was also unsatisfied with their sound quality: his experimental improvements included using a cactus needle as a stylus. Russell envisioned a system that would record and replay sounds without physical contact between its parts; and he saw that the best way to achieve such a system was to use light. after years of work, Russell succeeded in inventing the first digital-to-optical recording and playback system (patented in 1970). He had found a way to record onto a photosensitive platter in tiny "bits" of light and dark, each one micron in diameter; a laser read the binary patterns, and a computer converted the data into an electronic signal --- which it was then comparatively simple to convert into an audible or visible transmission. Through the 1970s, Russell continued to refine the CD-ROM, adapting it to any form of data. Like many ideas far ahead of their time, the CD-ROM found few interested investors at first; but eventually, Sony and other audio companies realized the implications and purchased licenses.
By 1985, Russell had earned 26 patents for CD-ROM technology. He then founded his own consulting firm, where he has continued to create and patent improvements in optical storage systems,
Fujio Masuoka
Dr. Fujio Masuoka born May 8, 1943, Takasaki, Gunma is the inventor of flash memory.
He is a world-renowned technologist credited as the inventor of flash memory. He has spent most of his career working on the research and development of numerous kinds of semiconductor memory including flash memory, programmable read-only memory and random access memory. He also possesses considerable knowledge in image sensing devices (such as charge-coupled devices) and high-speed semiconductor logic.
He is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and a member of the Institution of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers, Japan. He is also Professor Emeritus of the Research Institute of Electrical Communication at Tohoku University in Japan. Since quitting Toshiba in 1994, he has been working on what he expects will be an even more important invention: a "three-dimensional silicon-based semiconductor," he says, which will increase the capacity of semiconductors by a factor of ten.
Future of memory devices
Solid state devices, which have captured the marketplace are going to get even smaller and have more capacity. Research now is focused on eliminating their comparative weaknesses more than anything else. Current flash storage of the more affordable multi-level cell variety can only be written to about 10,000 before failure.
Holographic storage
Holographic storage, like GE is working on,stores data down inside in many, many layers, encoding the data using thousands and thousands of tiny holograms throughout the entire disc. On a broader level, where GE's holographic storage differs from the other major approach to holographic storage (called page-based), and what allows it to reach densities of 1TB per disc, is that it uses even tinier micro holograms that store less data per individual hologram, but more in aggregate. the discs are the same physical size and shape as CDs and DVDs, and they use a laser that's very similar to Blu-ray's, even using the same wavelength. On a hardware level, it just uses a slightly different optical element, but the rest basically comes down to software/firmware,i.e. Blu-ray discs can still be played in a holographic storage drive.
Carbon nanoballs
use metallofullerenes - carbon "cages" with embedded metallic compounds - as materials for miniature data storage devices. Researchers have discovered that metallofullerenes are capable of forming ordered supramolecular structures with different orientations. By specifically manipulating these orientations it might be possible to store and subsequently read out information.
Apart from these there are many areas of current research like molecular storage, bacterial storage, quantum mechanics aiming at better, faster and high capacity memory devices.
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