Part one of term paper
Even before the first commercial computers appeared in 1951, "mass" storage, although minuscule by today's standards, was a necessity. As early as the mid-1800s, punch cards were used to provide input to early calculators and other machines. The 1940s ushered in the decade when vacuum tubes were used for storage until, finally, tape drives st ...

Part two of term paper
... and minicomputer installations. Vast "disk farms" of giant 14 and 8 inch drives costing tens of thousands of dollars each buzzed away in the air conditioned isolation of corporate data centers. The personal computer revolution in the early 1980s changed all that, ushering in the introduction of the first small hard disk drives. The first 5.25-inch hard disk drives packed 5 to 10 MB of storage, the equivalent of 2,500 to 5,000 pages of double-spaced typed information, into a device the size ...