The 60 year old story of magnetic tape

BANGALORE, INDIA: How many times have we come across a write-up that talks about how tape is receding away into some corner of data centres. It has been termed dead several times over, how so ever, it is still in use.

May 2012 marks the 60th year of magnetic tape. Read the full story of the first magnetic tape here.

"Magnetic tape storage introduced the world to the idea of digital storage. Before tape, information was saved on punched cards–the data was tangible. But with magnetic tape, you could no longer see the data on the storage medium. This was a whole new concept. As customers got used to the idea, it opened the path for the IBM RAMAC disk drive and every data storage device since then," says the company in its website.

An unglamorous invention called the vacuum column wound up being the key in the 1950s to a whole new generation of data storage technology based on magnetic tape. The technology helped boost the speed of data processing and solve the problem of the tidal waves of punched cards flooding corporate and government offices,"

IBM announced its first tape device, the IBM 726, on May 21, 1952. It stored data at 6.1KB/sec and had a capacity of about 2.3MB.

Tape storage has evolved in many ways since the IBM 726 Tape Unit was introduced with the 701.

"In 1952, IBM introduced the magnetic tape drive vacuum column, making it possible for fragile magnetic tape to become a viable data storage medium. The use of the vacuum column in the IBM 701 Electronic Data Processing System signaled the beginning of the era of magnetic storage, as the technology became widely adopted throughout the industry. It marked the transition from punched card calculators to electronic computers."

IBM shipped its IBM 701 computer with an IBM Type 726 tape reader and recorder with a storage density of 100 characters per inch and speeds up to 75 inches per second. The follow-on IBM 727 doubled the density to 200 characters per inch and increased the speed to 500 inches per second. By the time the IBM System/360 was announced in 1964, IBM was offering vacuum column magnetic tape drives that could process 90,000 characters per second, and start and stop in 0.0015 seconds.

The digital tapes have come a long way since then and are still in use, though not as much as they were once. Whether it will make a comeback or not, that does not take away the importance of this technology, not in another decade per say.

"Tape remains the most cost-effective, flexible and scalable medium for high-capacity storage backup today–more than 50 years after it was first introduced as a storage medium," believes the company.

What do you think?