The 60th anniversary of IBM's digital tape is coming up in May. Oh yeah, and tape is dead. Or so industry pundits have declared, echoing similar prognostications for the mainframe.
But in reality, tape has a long life ahead of it. At 60, in many ways, it's just getting started.
That's because, unlike the mainframe, tape's role in the enterprise is dramatically changing. Only a few years ago, with the emergence of cheap, high-capacity disk drives, many pundits thought tape would be relegated to the dusty storerooms of long-term data archive. Gone were the days when tape was used for primary backup and recovery or streaming media.
But, with the performance of next-generation tape drives hitting 525MB/sec. -- and at a price of around $25 per terabyte of capacity -- tape is too fast and too cheap to write off. New open file formats are also making it possible to use tape in new markets.
IBM's first magnetic tape device for digital storage, the 7-track tape, was introduced in 1952. The IBM 726 tape was about the size of a pizza and held 2.3MB of data with a transfer rate of about 7.5KB/sec. That's about enough to store a minute and a half of a song on your smartphone.
IBM arrived in the tape market a year after the first magnetic tape was introduced. It was used to store data from the Eckert-Mauchly UNIVAC I, the enormous piece of equipment that was the first commercial computer in the U.S. That tape reel held just 224KB of data.
IBM's 726 tape unit was released in 1952. Each tape held 2.3MB of data.
Read the full story
