How was data stored in the 80's?

Here's how.

In the 1980, the IBM 3380 was born: it looked like a refrigerator, weighed almost 250 Kg, and its price is 40.000$, nowadays compared with almost 115.000$. It's the first Gigabyte hard drive, actually its capacity is 2,52 GB (2x1,26 GB); it could read or write 3 MB per second and had a mean access time of 16 ms.
Then, in the same year, the Seagate produced the ST-506, a 5.25 hard drive for 5 MB: Its price was 1.500 $. The similar ST-412 had doubled the capacity and the read-write rate just changing the encoding.

After the half of 1982, the first Compact Disc (CD) was produced in a Philips and DuPont's factory: The Music world start to sell music thanks to CDs: 52nd Street, recorded by Billy Joel was sold with the player since October of this year.
Have you ever asked yourself why the maximum capacity of a CD is about 74' and 33''? At the beginning, Phillips and Sony co-worked together to define a new international standard: ideas were usually contrasting, but on the capacity of this device everybody was fine: 60 minutes was the chosen standard. Soon the capacity was brung to the actual 74' and 33'' because this is the length of the Beethoven's ninth symphony played by Furtwängler at Bayreuth's Festival in 1951.

In the 1983, the Rodime produced the RO352, the first 3.5" hard drive: its capacity was about 10 MB. Some say Rodime patented the 3.5" standard, even if a 3.5" floppy drive was announced by Tandon and Shugart, first seen at Fall Joint Computer Conference.

If this picture on the left reminds something to you, it's not the first time you see the SCSI logo. It's the 1986 and SCSI becames a set of defined commands, protocols and electrical and optical devices. The goal of using this standard is to see each device as a generic device. The thought at the basis of the creation of this standard is that is easier to control one unique device instead of thousands of different devices: SCSI can "hide" the complexity of phisical formats.

1988: Terry Johnson founded PrairieTek; Terry, who had pioneered the transitions to smaller and smaller Hard Drives, reduced the size but not the capacity: the perfect fit for laptop computers. One of the most innovative products of the PrairieTek was the model 220: 20 MB made of 2 2,5" Disks.
Nowadays, each Laptop contains a 2,5" Hard Disk Drive.