Notable Events In The Storage And IT Industry: A Historical Summary - Technology Information

Computer Technology Review,  Oct, 1999  by Fred Moore

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1911 IBM incorporated as a computing and tabulating company.

1946 The first general-purpose computer, the ENIAC (Electrical numerical Integrator and Calculator) was built. It performed 5,000 additions and 1,000 multiplications per second while occupying 1,500 square feet of space.

1951 The UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) becomes the first commercially available computer.

1952 The industry's first tape drive arrives, the IBM 726 Tape Unit for the IBM 701 Defense Calculator. The 701 cost over $1 million, used magnetic core memory that was priced at $1 Per bit, and had to be refrigerated.

1956 In Sept., IBM announces the first commercial disk drive, the RAMAC 350 having 5MB of capacity on a 24-inch diameter platter and priced at $7,800 per MB.

1958 "The Fairchild Eight" produced the first integrated circuit.

1959 On May 28, CODASYL (Conference of Data Systems Languages) met to design the specs for COBOL. COBOL was commercially available a year later and officially changed to a four-digit date field in 1974.

1964 The S/360 product line was announced and became one of the top 100 technological events of the 20th century

1969 The first high-performance device appears, the IBM 2301 Drum, with a 4.09MB capacity, 8.6msec avg. access time, and a price of $22,716 per MB.

1969 The first Arpanet node is established at UCLA. Three others soon followed in what would be the beginnings of the Internet.

1972 IBM, SVS, and MVS announced virtual operating systems.

1973 Bell Labs develops the C programming language.

1978 Storage Technology Corp. announced the first Solid-State Disk for the mainframe virtual storage market with a 45MB capacity and an average access time of .3msec. The price was $8,800.00 per MB.

1980 The 3380 family of 14-inch diameter disks was announced on June 11 and enjoyed a useful product life into the early 1990s.

1981 Cached disk subsystems are announced, offering significant performance improvements.

1982 Intel introduces the 80286 chip rated at 12.5MHz. Four versions of the chip would follow.

1984 Apple Computer introduces the Macintosh.

1987 Nearline robotic tape libraries are announced by StorageTek and become a new level of the storage hierarchy between disk and manual tape. Subsequently, tape libraries save the tape industry.

1988 The RAID (Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks) are defined at the University of California, Berkeley. RAID becomes the de-facto standard for nearly multi-user systems in the 1990s.

1991 The tape industry embraces many new formats including linear, helical, and narrow-track longitudinal recording. Tape libraries are now produced by more than fifteen different companies.

1993 The first one-terabyte capacity disk array system is announced by EMC, the 5500-9.

1994 The Information Highway is officially named the Internet and reaches 5 million users.

1997 The capacity of a single disk from Seagate reaches 47GB, 9,400 times greater than the original RAMAC.

1999 The areal density of magnetic disks exceeds 20 million bits per square inch.

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