From punch cards to Blu-ray, a history of data storage

My my my, what a walk down memory lane Maximum PC has in store for old-school computer users today: A timeline of data storage formats dating back to the very dawn of computing.

I'm not old enough to have ever used punch cards or other paper-based storage systems, but I certainly did my time with cassette tapes and just about every other format on the list (yes, even 8-inch floppies and reel-to-reel tapes).

Who will ever forget 5.25" and 3.5" floppies? I even retain a small collection of the latter -- alas, I junked my last 5.25" drive (just in case!) several years ago -- just in case I find myself needing to install MS-DOS 6 or Windows 3.1.

But while it's fun to reminisce about the good-old days, this fun timeline is at its best when it digests the flops: Magneto-optical drives never caught on (I have vivid memories of a nervous geek showing off his expensive yet doomed "floptical" drive at a computer users meeting in the early '90s), and of course there's the MiniDisc, which never became a hit for audio, much less data storage.

Bonus points if you remember the Jaz drive, which Iomega tried to position as a higher-capacity successor to the briefly-ubiquitous Zip drive, but which cost too much for mainstream users and had the bad timing to come out just as CD-R and DVD-R was taking off.

Naturally, I do have one gripe with the piece. The major oversight here is the omission of the SyQuest drive, an early removable hard drive that came in a cartridge format. It was a major standard in the 1980s and early '90s, used for carrying large files around (they were rugged enough to be mailed them from one place to another) and in some backup situations instead of tape. Alas, like everything else, it was eventually cannibalized by bigger, better, and cheaper things... 

Good times, good times.