A Brief History of Data Storage

For millennia, humans have known things. Pretty soon, we started writing them down; our brains aren’t very good at storing everything we know reliably, and we needed something more durable.

A long time ago, ‘writing things down’ looked like clay tablets with cuneiform on them, and affairs have only got more complicated from there. Nowadays, we try and store data so that computers can understand it too, and that’s given us a bewildering array of options - disk drives, magnetic tape storage and much more.

In this talk, we’ll take a look at the history of storing data, and discuss why some methods have worked better than others. We’ll talk about why some types of storage work best for certain purposes, and how that affects us as engineers. Finally, we’ll take a look at what the state-of-the-art is today for keeping data safe, and what the future might hold.

This talk has no prerequisites, although a fondness for weird facts will certainly enhance the experience.