The Evolution of Secondary Storage

From the past lecture, our lecturer had mentioned about secondary storage devices in Malaysia for the past decade. She had said that during her university life, they needed a lot of diskette to submitted one assignment. It had arouse my curiosity about the evolution of secondary storage devices.

Therefore, i did a little bit of research and below is my findings.

History of secondary storage is quite interesting, with each generation, it gets better, faster, secure, reliable and smaller it size and always expanding the storage capacity.

The first external storage device was paper punch card. It used paper card with holes as data. A hole means zero, and no hole was one. Printer that time were used to punch the output for storage.

Paper was quickly out-dated once the Floppy Drive (8'') started to be used for storage. It became popular as it was more robust and handy than the paper roll, and could store more data.

The advancement of floppy drive with the 3.5'' that is small and sturdy enough to carry in the pocket. This floppy drive even had cover for the area that is use for reading. The purpose is to protect it from dust.

The first released of Zip Drive was capable of holding 100MB of data. Compare to floppy Drive, this technology were more quality and superior which needs specialized drives for reading and writing on the media. It became a good backup drive.

Flash drive also known as pen drive is the next revolution in secondary portable storage device. The main attraction was capable of being used on any computer equipped with USB port. So now virtually nothing more is needed for this drive to work if you have a computer with USB port.

Card media (SD/MMC/MS) is a stamp sized media that became popular from portable devices like cameras and phones. Media started shrinking and its capacity always increasing. It uses the same technology as the USB drive internally, only the interface is differing in order for it to be used by various devices like camera and mobile phones. Now days Card Reader for these type of media are getting shipped as a standard accessory from leading Computer manufacturers.

Week 1- Information Technology, The Internet and WE

Information technology is a set of tools, processes and alternatives used to collect, analyze, and present information. It has been used widely in many industries nowadays. We could not deny that IT play an important role in our lives. The are many reason why IT is so popular because it could help us to process large amount of information and present it in a more clear and concise manner. This could help the recipients easily grasp the information and understand the message that the sender try to convey. Speaking of businesses, IT could improve the company productivity, improve performance by increased the ability of sharing information within company, and others.

As we know, the Internet has helped in the development of civilization. In the past century, human lived in the world that has no communication network. Now, we can stay connected with people from all over the world. Other than that, we could share information to our friends or business partners in anytime at anywhere. How can human do that? The answer is the Internet. The Internet had made the world become 'visible'. We feel grateful for the invention of the Internet.

From the last lecture, we had learn that information system (IS) consist of five parts:
1) hardware - tools or equipment that processes raw data to create information.

2) software - a series of instruction that convert the data into information.

3) data - any data that have not been processed and does not have meaning in its.

4) procedure - instruction or guidelines that the user must be follow when they are using hardware and software.

5) people - the most important in information system, it determine who will create and use the information.


Besides that, we have learn on the evolution of web. Thus, we have do some research on this topic.

First, web 1.0- Read-or-Write Web

• authors write down what they want to share and then publish online.
• readers can watch what the author wrote in the web and subjectively comprehend the meanings.
• link between writers and readers become generally disconnected.
• does not facilitate direct communication between web readers and writers.
  

Second, web 2.0- Read/Write Web

• writers and readers both can read and write to the same web space.
• allow establishing friendly social communication among web users.
• link between writers and readers become generally connected.

Third, web 3.0 (Semantic Web)- Read/Write Request Web

• connect victual representative of real people who use the world wide web (www)
• eliminate the distinction between readers and writers on the web.

To sum up, web 1.0 connect the real people to the world wide web. Web 2.0 connect real people who use the world wide web. Then, the latest web 3.0 connect virtual representative of people who use the world wide web.