The Evolution of Digital Storage

The information age, sometimes called the digital age, is the era of time characterized by very fast modes of data transference and access to information that was traditionally tough to come by, such as our access to tools like Google and amazingly broad knowledge databases like Wikipedia. Unbeknownst to many of us living in this age is that the actual term “digital” simply describes a method of transferring data as represented by discrete variables, nothing more. By this definition of digital, anything that represents something else in the form of a discrete variable such as a number, a letter, or any other symbol would be considered digital, including archaic devices such as the abacus, written text, or any other collection of variables which represent concepts. This may come as a surprise to most techies because when we hear the term “digital” in the age of computers we are usually thinking of devices that transfer and store information based on binary signals across on an infrastructure that isn’t mechanical.

Despite the above meaning behind “digital,” it is safe to say that the working definition for this term is more important than the overly broad one found in dictionaries. Digital devices and methods for data storage have evolved tremendously just like the definition over the last decade, but many of us aren’t very sure as to the path these devices and their concepts had to take to finally come into being as they are today. Tracing back through recent history we can find that there are a few links to this evolutionary process and we have these links to thank for the advancements in digital storage we have today.

The conceptual birth of remote digital storage came from the same man responsible for the development of ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network): Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (J.C.R. Licklider). JCR once spoke of an intergalactic computer network through a series of memos back in the 1960’s and though JCR’s ideas were too advanced for the means available at his time, it eventually lead to what we can now call cloud-computing – Giving smaller computing devices the ability to use resources on stronger computing devices via remote access. The concept of hosting processing capabilities remotely also meant that a number of other computing factors would be hosted remotely including the computer’s memory.

The wide-spread use of the internet starting in the 1990’s is the infrastructure that was needed to generate companies that could provide both cloud-based services including remote digital storage. Back in 1999 one of the first digital online storage companies was born, FilesAnywhere, and has since spawned an industry of digital storage companies.

Here is a time-line of the progress that led to where we are now with digital storage since the internet boom of the 1990’s:

1999 – FilesAnywhere – One of the first cloud-based digital storage services and helped to start the movement toward outsourcing our digital storage services to other companies allowing us to remotely access our files from anywhere we have computer and internet access.

2001 – CloudMe – Owned and developed by Swedish company Xcerion, it is an online web desktop.

2005 – Box.net – A file sharing and cloud content management company founded as a college business project.

Mozy – An online backup service operated currently by VMware.

2006 – MediaFire – A free image and file hosting web site.

2007 – Dropbox – Started by two MIT graduates and is one of the most popular digital file storage companies to this day.

ADrive – Cloud storage and online backup, and file sharing.

Windows Live SkyDrive – Windows offering their own version of free storage to users that use the Windows Live suite of online programs.

2008 – Sugarsynch – Created from a company founded in 2004, it eventually was rebranded as Sugarsynch and is now offering digital storage and backup to users through them signing up and given a subdomain at the website.

2011 – iCloud – From Apple, allows users to store their music files on remote servers for download onto personal devices.

The digital movement as we know it from history has taken many turns and how we know it today will only resemble a shadow of itself years from now. It is no doubt that without the constant dynamic process that digital has taken on top of the infrastructure that the computer and internet has provided, mankind would still be using the archaic digital devices like the abacus, and still using discrete variables on paper to figure out problems.

Eric Greenwood is a technophile whose interests include all things cloud-computing related from online storage, to other aspects of the software as a service movement. Get more interesting tips, advice, and news at the blog Online Storage!