Geekologie's superb "Evolution of Storage" infographic traces the history of data, music and photo storage from the wax cylinder to the 2TB hard drive. I think I'll print this out and hang it on the wall of my office, for the same reason poets kept skulls on their writing desks*: "this too shall pass, all is hubris and folly, the future rushes up upon you."
Incidentally, why is a raven like a writing-desk? Because Poe wrote on both of them.
Previously:
- Netgear's tiny Network Attached Storage RAID -- just right for a ...
- How to fit 500GB on a DVD - Boing Boing
- Learn to build a network-attached storage out of old PCs tonight ...
- Open design for a 67 TB array for $7867 - Boing Boing
- USB cow with furry tentacles and 8GB of storage -- Boing Boing ...
- Nano-turbine is a generator, data-storage medium and molecular ...
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Cool, but the colors are hosed.
Does it bug anyone else that the color-coding of the data size packets is inconsistent with the key at the bottom?
Am I color blind or are the colors for DVD / Blu-Ray red when they should be green?
dont go back far enough,
ive used:
88 Byte cards (honeywell 680)
1.2 K Papertape (40 bytes per inch)
16K 8 inch floppy disks (eclipse m680)
48K 8 inch floppy disks (eclipse)
88K 5.5 inch floppy disks (apple II)
192 5.5 floppy disk (double sided,double density)
my friends owned a 10Meg 5 inch HD for the apple II
It would be nice if the colors matched the key, but even then it's difficult to see the orders of magnitude that media sizes have increased in the last few years by changing the colors rather than showing a size difference.
I think some of the colours are wrong, and the first 5 1/4" disks weren't 1.2 meg, weren't they first 720 k and then it was only when they were enabled to write to the second side their capacity was doubled?
could be a little more comprehensive/clear... or at least not a lossy jpg.
1MB is not 1024 bytes.
The graphic leaves me strangely cold. No, actually I think it sucks - really bad.
Data storage capability is easily defined as "numbers of byes stored on physical media". That's a thoroughly quantifiable, err, quantity. Color coded maps (say States X lies in the 10-20% unmployment bracket) are just fine, but in this case, the technique falls flat on its face.
I realize that due to the high exponentially of the curve it's hard to visualize the information, but there must be a better way.
The graphic as shown above need labels, cute clipart and colorcodes an still seeminlgy needs to explain itself with explanatory text like "x is 1.234 the size of y".
And all it delivers - if even that - is the following information:
(Probably won't show corretcly on your browser)
1.2 5.25" Floppy 1.00
1.44 4.5" Floppy 1.01
100 Zip 1100100
700 CD 1010111100
1000 Jaz Drive 1111101000
4700 DVD 1001001011100
8500 Dual Layer DVD 10000100110100
25000 Blu Ray 110000110101000
50000 DL Blu Ray 1100001101010000
128000 Flash Drive 11111010000000000
2000000 2 TB Drive 111101000010010000000
Not only are the colors wrong in the middle bits, but the last two bobs are both labeled with a total size of 50GB.
Ouch. I just reread the article („superb" - no,not really) and went to the the site when I read the term "wax cylinder"
My first question was literally „How is a photo defined?“. There's no way that a 1.44 MB disk holds "50 photos", at least not of the same quality as the 24 picture film. And what do we take as an standard? Crappy 12 MP Jpegs with limted palette or quality 8 MP raw files? 9x13 or 10x15 prints?
@lovemycoffeecouse Yeah, but those were reed-only devices...
Where is the humble cassette tape, a staple of my entire childhood? :(
The raw numbers are staggering but I agree that the graphic is arbitrary and doesn't present them to their best effect. I was, however, glad to have a whole segment available to help me visualise the relationship between 60 minutes and 1 hour!
color coding is off, units are off, capacity count on the bottom row follows an entirely different schema (on top of being inaccurate). so, yeah, internal inconsistencies abound. it kind of seems...unfinished?
i would like to see a chart with every digital data storage medium, personally. 'cause there are a lot, and a good part of that history is also the history of music and photo storage. maybe throw in moving picture media, as well?
nice idea, clean presentation, just sort of...half-baked.
Yeah! Please give me a 128GB flash drive!!!
The color coding is simply wrong! Green does not exist in the picture.
How can one person get so many facts wrong? He simply does not know what he's talking about.
Nice idea, but the captions are a complete disaster
what the heck, according to that schematics a 700 mb cd has 7 mb of space, total.
Green (1MB) seems only to be used the once (DVD) every MB after that looks wrong
This image makes the concept it's trying to illustrate even more confusing. And what's that random crap about wireless datacards?
FAIL.
Better luck next time.
@ 2
it bothers me more that there is at least one of example where the plotter didn't count out the little boxes correctly.
I worked on a PDP-11 with removable drives that sat in drawers -- looked like UFO pie-plates or thin cake carriers. I don't remember how much they stored, though; everything has changed so much in terms of storage, data density, file-size magnitude. But I recall backing those suckers up every Friday night, and having to delete older files when the back-ups started getting full.
Come over to my rocking chair, junior, and I'll tell you more.
Did someone forget to edit this graphic?
Seems the young'uns have forgotten the haydays of drum storage (5 MB). Stone tablets, cave walls, papyrus, vellum, etc. should also be included ;)
This is cool, but the first 5,25" were 360KB and the first 3,5" were 720KB.
This is a cool first iteration, but I'd like more coherence and information.
Going back to wax cylinders for music is good, although the size of the records without speed is not so usefule. But data storage only goes back to 5.25" floppies? As others have pointed out, 8" discs lasted until the 80s at least.... and other formats are very interesting.
And how are images and music not data?
@ peterbruells
Dammit, i actually LOL'd :D
Have to agree with a lot of the other comments though: vast sections of the graphic are clearly coloured wrong.
Directly comparing analog and digital storage? What? And doesn't how many hours of digital music/number of photos depend entirely on audio/image format, quality, and size?
The other Michael: Certainly we were still using 8" floppies in 1986: it's what the software for our magnetic tape drive was written on. In a later job, we were still using punched paper (well tyvec really) at the dawn of THIS century.
Incomplete
here is an interesting example of the internet information age. No fact checking as well as personal opinion masquerading as fact.
>My first question was literally „How is a photo defined?“. There's no way that a 1.44 MB disk holds "50 photos"
maybe hello.jpg was adapted as an ISO standard image for size references ?
Only 44 minutes for a 12-inch LP? Many of them contain more than a full hour of music. Similarly for cassettes; most people used 90-minute cassettes (which would often hold two LPs).
This is an old copy of the graphic. If you trace back to the original gizmodo posting, then you'll see that the artist updated the graphic, fixing the colour screw-ups (but still not getting the size of a MB correct)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7979419@N02/4145219729/
A good idea poorly realized. The size of audio, video, pictures, etc. is highly variable and is largely dependent on quality. The colors are often wrong and are themselves unintuitive.
I like the idea: showing how storage space (and the size of the media) have scaled over the ages. I think it would be much easier to show with a chart of capacity and media size vs. year. Then you could clearly see how size has shrunken fairly consistently while storage has exploded exponentially.
AKMA, the RL-01 held 5 megabytes, and was single-sided. The RL-02 was visually identical, but was double-sided and thus held 10 Meg.
Both had aerodynamic heads, and the RL-02 had more than 32767 addressable physical sectors, which was a titanic pain in the ass when working in languages that did not support an unsigned two byte integer quantity, such as FORTRAN-II.
There'a a spot between 3.5" floppy and ZIP that needs to be filled by SyQuest and EZ-Quest. These were the standard for large capacity portable storage for years. Yes, ZIP killed them but they were important.
Yeah, I got triggered by the "photo" designation. My understanding is that the general rule of thumb for the resolving power of analog film is roughly this:
one well exposed 35mm silver-gelatin negative is equivalent to 20 million quality pixels and the resolution is approx. 4,000-5,000 dpi.
I would have enjoyed seeing the info also reflect the quality of information, not just the raw volume based on limited digital standards. Perhaps it means just a different chart.
Yeah, I got triggered by the "photo" designation. My understanding is that the general rule of thumb for the resolving power of analog film is roughly this:
one well exposed 35mm silver-gelatin negative is equivalent to 20 million quality pixels and the resolution is approx. 4,000-5,000 dpi.
I would have enjoyed seeing the info also reflect the quality of information, not just the raw volume based on limited digital standards. Perhaps it just means a different or additional chart.
In the last few years it seems like infographics have gained a lot of popularity. I know BoingBoing likes to link them. One of the reasons is probably that it's quite easy to find data and that a decent graphic designer can put together a snazzy vector-based chart or graph to showcase some piece of info.
That doesn't make these GOOD graphs, though. I love the idea that we're getting more interested in data as a culture (or at least as a subculture). But simply throwing out data in some pretty-looking chart doesn't stun me. Look at 538.com, where Nate Silver and his buddies hack together Excel charts that beat what the rest of the mainstream media is doing with political analysis. In other words, I don't want to hear about a cool graph unless it's presenting interesting data in a comprehensible format.
@owenbarron I don't think that we as a culture, are really getting more interested in data. Take this graphic, for example. It doesn't really offer data (a small table would do that), but tries to convey a message. The message being "Storage devices become bigger and better." And it needs a whole friggin screen for that. It's chartjunk. Pretty pictures, used to bedazzle the casual reader.
And I don't have anything against pictures, charts, etc. The XCKD image about the Lord of the Ringe movie trilogy chart, was, for example, very well executed, because it was done in a way totally suited for its job. “Understanding Comics” is a pretty good book about comics, nearly academic, entirely done as a comic.
Infographics like the failed one above aren't bad, because they are not text. They are bad because they fail at what they are supposed to do - offer a rich amount of data or perhaps even a narrative beyond a simplistic statement.
punchcards/paper tape are a huge miss, as well as magnetic reel-to-reel. Also, where does "this too shall pass, all is hubris and folly, the future rushes up upon you" come from?
Thanks, Ito! I would have guessed at 12 megs if I had to, and double-sided sounds right. And with your advice, I looked them up at this page and had a shudder of recognition when I saw the data cartridge.
Of course, that was 26 years ago....
I believe that would be from one Edgar Allen Poe (though it's quite possible I may be mistaken here).
Speaking of old copy, I liked this infographic the first time I saw it, before this guy more than borrowed elements of it, when it hit on Digg in August and had well over 1000 diggs http://mozy.com/blog/misc/physical-storage-vs-digital-storage/ - next time this seemingly competent designer should try generating his own ideas.