From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media Data Storage / Memory Outline

The Royal Library of Alexandria: The Largest Collection of Recorded Information in the Ancient World
(Circa 300 BCE)

The Form of the Manuscript Book Gradually Shifts from the Roll to the Codex
(Circa 150 CE – 450 CE)

One of the Earliest Surviving Italian Manuscripts on Technology and War Machines
(Circa 1420)

The Best Medium for Long Term Information Storage
(1494)

Depiction of Record Keeping by Pieter Breughel the Younger
(1620 – 1640)

The Jacquard Loom Uses Punched Cards to Store Patterns
(1803)

The First Scientific Instrument to Record Scientific Information in Real Time
(1847)

Flong as an "Immutable Form of Information Capture"
(Circa 1850)

Electronic Memory
(January 29, 1944)

A Single Erasable High-Speed Memory
(July 15, 1946)

The World's First Electronic Computer Company
(September 1946)

The ENIAC Becomes an Elementary Stored-Program Computer
(1947)

Invention of Holography
(1947)

Northrop Places the Contract for the BINAC
(October 1947)

Patenting the Mercury Acoustic Delay-Line Electronic Memory
(October 31, 1947)

The First Magnetic Drum Memory
(1948)

Magnetic-Core Memory Replaces Electrostatic Memory on the Whirlwind I
(1951)

Applying New Technology to the Searching and Storage of Information
(1951)

First Use of Magnetic Tape for Data Storage
(1951)

Untitled
(1952)

IBM Installs its First Stored Program Electronic Computer, the 701, but They Don't Call it a Computer
(March 27, 1953)

Magnetic Core Storage Units
(1955)

The First Hard Drive: $10,000 per Megabyte
(1956)

"Libraries of the Future"
(1965)

Memory Caching
(April 1965)

Semi-Conductor Memory
(1966)

DRAM
(1966)

A Sensor for Recording Images
(1969)

Problem with the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer Nearly Prevents the First Moon Walk
(July 21, 1969)

The First Commercially Available DRAM Chip
(1970)

System/370 Using Semiconductor Memory
(June 30, 1970)

Floppy Disk
(1971)

The CD is Developed
(1976 – 1982)

A Printed Book Entitled Toward Paperless Information Systems
(1978)

Invention of Flash Memory
(Circa 1980)

The First Scanner?
(November 1982)

The First Digital Image Database of Cultural Materials
(1987)

DVDs
(September 1996)

How Much Information is There?
(1997)

How Much Information?
(2000)

The ASCI White Supercomputer
(June 29, 2000)

"Vegetal and Mineral Memory: The Future of Books"
(November 1, 2003)

Cortical Rewiring and Information Storage
(October 14, 2004)

Data Curation as a Profession
(2006)

"The entire works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages" would amount to 50 petabytes of data.
(May 14, 2006)

The First One Terabyte Hard Disk Drive
(January 4, 2007)

Data-Storing Bacteria Could Last Thousands of Years
(February 27, 2007)

It Would Take 1800 Years to Convert the Paper Records . . . .
(March 10, 2007)

"Computers vs. Brains"
(April 1, 2009)

Costs of Managed Archiving versus Passive Archiving of Data
(June 4, 2009)

Biological Journals to Require Data-Archiving
(January 2010)