Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Background Enabling Inventions
Without some convenient method of storing software, it would be difficult to have
a true software industry. One of the critical background inventions of the modern
software world was the development of the floppy disk and the floppy disk drive
in 1971.
The first floppy disk was eight inches in diameter and only held about 80 kilo-
bytes of information. But the floppy disk was a success and became a standard
feature of IBM's S/370.
Modern readers who use flash drives or external disk drives that weigh only an
ounce or two would be surprised at how big and heavy the early eight-inch disk
drives were. A disk drive sometimes weighed 40 pounds.
Even so, floppy disks provided an effective medium for storing, transporting,
and marketing software, without which there might not be a software industry.
Note
I once had an eight-inch drive connected to an early Tandy Radio
Shack TRS-80 computer. It was a large box about 18 inches wide
and deep and 12 inches high. I had to put the drive on the floor be-
cause it was too bulky and heavy to sit on a desk.
The older storage media of punch cards, paper tape, and magnetic tape were not
suitable for widespread software distributions. Punch cards and paper tape were
short-lived and susceptible to damage from humidity and water. Magnetic tape
was bulky and subject to fairly rapid magnetic degradation. Mainframe disk drives
existed but were too heavy and large for home use.
Equally important, Ted Codd from IBM in San Jose began to publish descript-
ive information about the relational database model, which would lead to vast im-
provements in data access and data access speed. Relational database technology
also opened up markets for a number of new vendors such as Ingres and Sybase,
as well as IBM's own System R.
The quartz movement used in modern watches dates back to the 1920s, but it
needed semiconductors to move into small personal timepieces. The Centre Elec-
tronique Horloger (CEH) built a working quartz analog watch in 1967. Sony built
a successful quartz watch, the Astron, in 1969.
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