| Year |
Event |
| 1890 |
Herman Hollerith developed a method for machines to to record and store information onto punch cards to be used for the US census. He later formed the company we know as IBM today. |
| 1946 |
Freddie Williams applies for a patent on his cathode-ray tube (CRT) storing device in December. The device that later became known as the Williams tube is capable of storing between 512 and 1024 bits of data. |
| 1946 |
The Selectron tube capable of storing 256 bits of information begins development. |
| 1950 |
Before using disks, storage units used magnetic drums referred to as drum machines or drum-memory computers. The first commercial drum machine was developed by the Engineering Research Associates of Minneapolis and used by the U.S. Navy ERA 110. Drum machines were used throughout the early '50s. |
| 1956 |
On September 13, 1956 the IBM 305 RAMAC is the first computer to be shipped with a hard drive that contained 50 24-inch platters and was capable of storing 5 million characters and weighed a ton. |
| 1959 |
Chucking Grinder Co. begins working on disk drives. |
| 1961 |
Chucking Grinder Co. moves to Walled Lake Michigan and becomes Bryant Computer Products, a subsidiary of Ex-Cello Corp. |
| 1961 |
IBM introduces the IBM 1301 disk storage unit June 2, 1961, capable of storing 28 million characters |
| 1962 |
On October 11, 1962 IBM introduced the IBM 1311 disk storage drive, which stored |
| 1973 |
IBM ships the 3340 Winchester hard drive with two spindles and a capacity of 30MB. This drive was the first drive to utilize the Winchester technology. |
| 1980 |
Seagate introduces the ST506 hard drive, the first hard drive developed for microcomputers |
| 1980 |
The first Gigabyte hard drive is introduced by IBM and weighed 550lbs with a price of $44,000. |
| 1986 |
The original SCSI, SCSI-1 is developed. |
| 1990 |
SCSI-2 is approved. |
| 1996 |
SCSI-3 is approved. |
| 2002 |
Hitachi closes deal to purchase IBM's hard drive operation for $2.05 billion on December 31, 2002. |
