The Death of the Disk

If you found this would you know what you are looking at?

This is the first talking machine!  It recorded speech and played it back to you as you turned the crank.

When was this made ? 1887.  The same time as electricity was being harnessed and the light bulb, telephone and automobile  were being  invented and developed.

What is it’s name?  The phonograph.

I know what your thinking that the image does not look like a phonograph.

Well let me introduce to you the gramophone that came out a year later.

Because the method was the same as the phonograph but  just the means were different, people called the  gramophone  the phonograph.

And just as confusing the cylinder and the platter were both called recordings or records holding 2 minutes of voice or music.

By the 1920’s the invention of the radio and it’s spread throughout every household had forced the closure of many recording companies resulting in the demise of the cylinder and dominance of the platter as the standard for recordings.

In the 1930’s the invention of magnetic tape competed with the disk platters as the standard of recording and continued to do so until the 1980’s where the two were joined with the disk platter coated with magnetic material for recording.  Mass storage for main frame computers had used magnetic disks from the 1970’s for data.

Now the platter could hold sound and/or  data.  In the computer they were the mass storage.

Video and movie storage was still restricted to celluloid; because the storage capacity for a single full color image could never be stored on a computer’s hard drive, the image was too big!

In 1985 an alternate media was applied to the disk to increase capacity and incorporated the laser, it was called the laser disk or compact disc. The CD ROM exceeded the capacity of the hard drives of the time and could hold images and videos.  Meanwhile as the hard drive platters continued to grow in capacity and CD ROM’s developed into the DVD’s,  3.5″ floppy disks were replaced by  flash drives. In 2000 a little flash drive could hold 8 meg of data and against the 1.44meg  floppies there was no competition.   In 2001 the digital media players (MP3)  hit the music world and continue to take out large chunks of the market from CD’s.

What is inside the flash drive and the digital media players?

Magic rocks! Silicon memory chips.

The new storage  media is digital and it’s capacity is doubling each year!

Ah but will digital replace the hard drive?

In 2009 the 80, the 160, the 320 giga byte and the 1 tera byte Solid State Drives (SSD) drives were released.

Here is the difference looking at the insides of the two drives; the hard disk drive and the solid state.

 Notice a big difference?

In a very short 4 to 6 years the disk will be dead.

Will anyone miss it ?

Probably not, but I thought you’d like to know 🙂

by R. Frank Tulak