PHOTO
Magnetic tape
As electronics improved, it became possible to record high densities of data on magnetic tape orginally designed to store analogue audio signals.
This is the oldest data storage technology still in regular use in enterprise IT, as it has used subsequent developments in material science and component construction to remain an economical way to semi-permanently store large amounts of data.
Its use for regular storage tailed off in the 1980s as floppy disks became cheap and capacious enough to replace cassette storage. This particular unit is from a 1960 Eliot 803B in Bletchley Park, and is a very early example of a tape drive. The tape is made from coated 35mm film stock.
Photo credit: Rupert Goodwins
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Don't forget Magnetic Bubble memory invented by Bell Labs in the late sixties. It was a form of non-volatile memory. At one time, it was going to become the storage unit in every computer but falling hard drive prices destroyed its commercial potential.
Also the chinese and anyone with non Latin /greek characters could not adopt the press, i.e. chinese, arabic, japanese, in fact only the europeans and russians were the major civilisations to use printed books until the 19th century, prior to which the renaissance happened and enlightenment.
This is quite wrong in all respects.
The history of printing is complex and China and other parts of Asia were the first to print on paper and even developed movable type.
See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing
Also the Russians are actually Europeans... Since Europe is defined as that part of Eurasia to the West of the Ural mountains. That area (West of the Ural Mountains) in the far east of Europe is where ethnic Russians first emerged and where most of them still live to this day, it is called Russia. If you talk about the modern Russian federation or the old Russian Empire or Soviet Russia then you have to include Siberia and parts of Central Asia