Memory and how we used to store data; A brief history of storage modalities

Origin of Data Storage: The Ishango Bone

The first known example of data storage can be found in 9,000 BC. In the 1960s, archaeologists discovered what is known as the Ishango Bone. A baboon’s tibia and its quartz notches were used for simple calculations and illustrate how people have been collecting data for millennia by marking the relevant numbers on a stick or other long object.

The Great Library of Alexandria: A Repository of Knowledge

But let’s go further, at the end of the 4th century BC. and to the most famous collection of knowledge in the ancient world: the Great Library of Alexandria. There is a misconception that its resources were burned during the siege of the city by Gaius Julius Caesar. The collection of scrolls, or at least a significant part of it, seems to have survived the fire, as all indications indicate. And the library apparently collapsed around the 3rd century AD due to underfunding and neglect. We may say that it contained all that the ancient world had come to know. But what does that mean? How much data was stored on the coast of Egypt?

Alexandria’s estimated storage capacity

It is estimated that Alexandria had between 40,000 and 400,000 scrolls. On average, it takes about 34 KB of memory to store one of the twenty-four books of the Iliad on a computer. Consider this the equivalent of a scroll in the Great Library. We can estimate that Alexandria had between 1.3 and 13 GB of storage space, depending on the assumed number of manuscripts in the collection. Just a little bigger than a fingernail, the Samsung Fit Plus USB flash drive can store up to 256GB of data, so you can store all the knowledge of the ancient world mentioned above many times over and carry it in the pocket.

The impact of printing and modern libraries

Of course, the invention of movable type and the development of printing made it possible to significantly expand library collections. The researchers compared the Alexandrian scrolls to 100,000 modern books. Meanwhile, the largest library in the world, the collection of the US Congress, contains 170 million items, stored on various media. The size of this data is estimated to be around 10 petabytes (10 million GB).

Miniaturization and the digital revolution

The first miniaturization of data occurred in the late 19th century. Punch cards were used to record the results of the 1890 U.S. Census In the early 1950s, the tapes stored 2 million digits per drum. The memory used for the Apollo rockets was 74 KB. It was a read-only solution, not data storage, and everything was done by hand, even by hand.

The explosion of data in the modern era

With the development of the Internet and the widespread adoption of computers, people began to create and collect unimaginable amounts of data. In 2023, an estimated 120 zettabytes (1 zettabyte is 1 million million petabytes) of new information were created, 60 times more than in 2010. By 2025, this figure is expected to rise to 181 zettabytes.

From baboon bones to portable storage

There’s a reason behind the countless storage methods we’ve used over the centuries. Our brains are unreliable, although scientists have calculated that they are capable of storing 2.5 petabytes of data. Whether it’s a knot on a string, a note or a modern portable drive, external media makes life easier by keeping data organized and accessible. The latter allows you to take a lot with you, with the Samsung T9 models offering up to 4TB of storage space and also fitting in your pocket (they’re much smaller than a mobile phone with a similar width and height with those of a business card). The evolution of ways to store numbers and important memories shows how far we’ve come from the days when we relied on baboon bones.