Magnetic Tape Storage

“As I recall, the major push first came from our study of the Social Security System and their very pressing need to solve their record storage problem. Even in 1949 they had acres of file cabinets of IBM cards containing Social Security records on every working American employee. It was obvious that we had to find a more compact means of storing permanent records. And, there was not much choice. We had tried more dense paper cards (smaller holes, binary codes, etc.), but the projected improvement was only a few times better. Punched paper tape offered no great advantage either. Magnetic tape was just coming into its own in audio systems and it offered the most promise, so that’s the way we went.”

“We tried many things. We tried idler arms with pulleys, block and tackle arrangements and various air pressure schemes to form a buffer loop of tape, but none of these satisfied us much. One day we bought a home vacuum cleaner and blew air down into a rectangular column to push the loop down. That didn't work too well. Then we switched from the blower to the vacuum end of the cleaner and sucked the tape loop from the bottom instead of blowing it down from the top. Immediately, we realized we had something and from then on it was just a matter of logical implementation to solve the buffer loop problem.”

“We were in a hurry to try out the idea … and needed some very thin, flexible material in order to fabricate a sensitive pressure sensing diaphragm. Nothing suitable being on hand, the quickest solution that occurred to me was to send one of the young engineers, Jack Seely, to the nearest drug store for a pair of baby pants. They worked.”

“In 1952, the world's first successful tape drive was delivered, the IBM 726 with 12,500 bytes of capacity per reel. In 1956 the world's first disk drive was delivered, the Ramac 350 with 5 megabytes of capacity. Though no one knew it at the time, two key events in the storage industry had occurred; 1) the storage hierarchy was created with online and offline storage and 2) the first storage management applications were born, namely backup and recovery. Backup and recovery would become the primary storage management application for the next 50 years as protecting data became increasingly important.”

“When the storage applications require rapid data access times above any other quality, disk has a clear advantage over tape. But for applications where rapid data access times are not the only priority, or where rapid data access is one of many equally important characteristics needed, tape's significant advantages in terms of true cost, density, reliability, data protection and portability will continue to make it the technology of choice.”

“IBM researchers have achieved a 44-fold capacity improvement over today’s most popular magnetic tape product, boosting capacity to 35 terabytes, and extending the technology’s lifespan for many years to come. ... Tape has been around for almost 60 years, going back to the IBM 726 Magnetic Tape Unit, which used reels of half-inch-wide tape that each had a capacity of about 2 megabytes. This week’s announcement represents a potential increase in capacity of 17,500,000 times compared with the 726.”

“The future is exciting for both tape and non-tape technologies, and we expect to see tremendous advancements as innovators continue to make advancements that better meet the storage needs of customers. One thing that we do not expect to change is the stream of predictions about the demise of tape—we expect those to last another 40 years, as tape continues to be an important technology in the storage industry.”