Frank Romano's Media Storage Types Exhibit

This week, Frank shows off an exhibit he put together consisting of all different forms of media. From jacquard looms, to punch cards, to floppy disks, to DVDs. Frank has the history of storage media covered!

Published on October 31, 2014

Discussion

By Paul Foster on Oct 31, 2014

Thanks for the trip down "memory" lane! Ha, Ha! I couldn't resist!

It is amazing to look back on my career and realize that I came into contact with most of what you have collected in your exhibit. It also brought back "memories" (buh-dum-bump) of the tears shed and curse words uttered when inserting a [place name of magnetic media here], with a deadline looming, only to find that it was unreadable.

I am sure it's only a matter of time before we will be able to transmit data telepathically . . . catastrophic "memory" failure in the future will take on a whole new meaning!

By Dov Isaacs on Oct 31, 2014

Of course, on the other side of this are all the legacy file formats, many highly proprietary, that the industry has gone through over the last fifty years.

Thus, even if you can still read those antique media, if you don't have the software to decode the contents or even have the specifications to decode same, you still have problems.

- Dov

By David Avery on Nov 03, 2014

And how many of these have files you want - but cant read anymore?

By Gordon Pritchard on Nov 03, 2014

Brings to mind this RE:Print cartoon:
http://media.printplanet.com/images/185-Slipped-Disks.jpg

By John Clifford on Nov 03, 2014

And don't forget Bernoulli drives and the 3" magneto Optical drives.

I remember when I moved from a Compuwriter IV which had NO memory to the Editwriter which had an 8" floppy disk and the wonder of it all. The ability to go back and edit without having to "cut in" corrections. The wonders of new technology. Oh, and a single 8" floppy (320k) cost me $35 but only if I bought them in a box of 10, so $350 for about 3MB. AND we were thrilled to pay it.

By Pete Basiliere on Nov 03, 2014

As you pointed out when I last visited the Museum of Printing in Andover MA, a few years from now the only working presses in a museum will be the old, mechanical ones - not the digital printers. Ironically, we won't have the media to use in the digital printers years and decades hence.

By Werner Rebsamen on Nov 07, 2014

Frank - as David Avery said - who can red those files. Books and printing on paper will be around 100 years from now!