Memory & Storage: Crash Course Computer Science #19 Video Lecture | Introduction to Computer Science: An Overview - Software Development

Hi, I'm Carrie Anne, and welcome to Crash
Course Computer Science!
We’ve talked about computer memory several
times in this series, and we even designed
some in Episode 6.
In general, computer memory is non-permanent.
If your xbox accidently gets unplugged and
turns off, any data saved in memory is lost.
For this reason, it’s called volatile memory.
What we haven’t talked so much about this
series is storage, which is a tad different.
Any data written to storage, like your hard
drive, will stay there until it’s over-written
or deleted, even if the power goes out.
It’s non-volatile.
It used to be that volatile memory was fast
and non-volatile storage was slow, but as
computing technologies have improved, this
distinction is becoming less true, and the
terms have started to blend together.
Nowadays, we take for granted technologies
like this little USB stick, which offers gigabytes
of memory, reliable over long periods of time, all at low cost, but this wasn’t always true.
INTRO
The earliest computer storage was paper punch cards, and its close cousin, punched paper tape.
By the 1940s, punch cards had largely standardized
into a grid of 80 columns and 12 rows, allowing
for a maximum of 960 bits of data to be stored
on a single card.
The largest program ever punched onto cards,
that we know of, was the US Military’s Semi-Automatic
Ground Environment, or SAGE, an Air Defense
System that became operational in 1958.
The main program was stored on 62,500 punchcards,
roughly equivalent to 5 megabytes of data,
that’s the size of an average smartphone
photo today.
Punch cards were a useful and popular form
of storage for decades, they didn’t need
power, plus paper was cheap and reasonably
durable.
However, punchcards were slow and write-once,
you can’t easily un-punch a hole.
So they were a less useful form of memory,
where a value might only be needed for a fraction
of a second during a program's execution,
and then discarded.
A faster, larger and more flexible form of
computer memory was needed.
An early and practical approach was developed
by J. Presper Eckert, as he was finishing
work on ENIAC in 1944.
His invention was called Delay Line Memory,
and it worked like this.
You take a tube and fill it with a liquid,
like mercury.
Then, you put a speaker at one end and microphone
at the other.
When you pulse the speaker, it creates a pressure
wave.
This takes time to propagate to the other
end of the tube, where it hits the microphone,
converting it back into an electrical signal.
And we can use this propagation delay to store
data!
Imagine that the presence of a pressure wave
is a 1 and the absence of a pressure wave
is a 0.
Our speaker can output a binary sequence like
1010 0111.
The corresponding waves will travel down the
tube, in order, and a little while later,
hit the microphone, which converts the signal
back into 1’s and 0’s.
If we create a circuit that connects the microphone
to the speaker, plus a little amplifier to
compensate for any loss, we can create a loop
that stores data.
The signal traveling along the wire is near
instantaneous, so there’s only ever one
bit of data showing at any moment in time.
But in the tube, you can store many bits!
After working on ENIAC, Eckert and his colleague
John Mauchly, set out to build a bigger and
better computer called EDVAC, incorporating
Delay Line Memory.
In total, the computer had 128 Delay Lines,
each capable of storing 352 bits.
That’s a grand total of 45 thousands bits
of memory, not too shabby for 1949!
This allowed EDVAC to be one of the very earliest
Stored-Program Computers, which we talked
about in Episode 10.
However, a big drawback with delay line memory
is that you could only read one bit of data
from a tube at any given instant.
If you wanted to access a specific bit, like
bit 112, you’d have to wait for it to come
around in the loop, what’s called sequential
or cyclic-access memory, whereas we really
want random access memory, where we can access
any bit at any time.
It also proved challenging to increase the
density of the memory, packing waves closer
together meant they were more easily mixed
up.
In response, new forms of delay line memory
were invented, such as magnetostrictive delay
lines.
These delay lines use a metal wire that could
be twisted, creating little torsional waves
that represented data.
By forming the wire into a coil, you could
store around 1000 bits in a 1 foot by 1 foot square.
However, delay line memory was largely obsolete
by the mid 1950s, surpassed in performance,
reliability and cost by a new kid on the block:
magnetic core memory which was constructed
out of little magnetic donuts, called cores.
If you loop a wire around this core…. and
run an electrical current through the wire,
we can magnetize the core in a certain direction.
If we turn the current off, the core will
stay magnetized.
If we pass current through the wire in the
opposite direction, the magnetization direction,
called polarity, flips the other way.
In this way, we can store 1’s and 0’s!
1 bit of memory isn’t very useful, so these
little donuts were arranged into grids.
There were wires for selecting the right row
and column, and a wire that ran through every
core, which could be used to read or write
a bit.
Here is an actual piece of core memory!
In each of these little yellow squares, there
are 32 rows and 32 columns of tiny cores,
each one holding 1 bit of data.
So, each of these yellow squares could hold
1024 bits.
In total, there are 9 of these, so this memory
board could hold a maximum of 9216 bits, which
is around 9 kilobytes.
The first big use of core memory was MIT’s
Whirlwind 1 computer, in 1953, which used
a 32 by 32 core arrangement.
And, instead of just a single plane of cores,
like this, it was 16 boards deep, providing
roughly 16 thousand bits of storage.
Importantly, unlike delay line memory, any
bit could be accessed at any time.
This was a killer feature, and magnetic core
memory became the predominant Random Access
Memory technology for two decades, beginning
in the mid 1950s even though it was typically
woven by hand!
Although starting at roughly 1 dollar per
bit, the cost fell to around 1 cent per bit
by the 1970s.
Unfortunately, even 1 cent per bit isn’t
cheap enough for storage.
As previously mentioned, an average smartphone
photo is around 5 megabytes in size, that’s
roughly 40 million bits.
Would you pay 4 hundred thousand dollars to
store a photo on core memory?
If you have that kind of money to drop, did
you know that Crash Course is on Patreon?
Right?
Wink wink.
Anyway, there was tremendous research into
storage technologies happening at this time.
By 1951, Eckert and Mauchly had started their
own company, and designed a new computer called
UNIVAC, one of the earliest commercially sold
computers.
It debuted with a new form of computer storage:
magnetic tape.
This was a long, thin and flexible strip of
magnetic material, stored in reels.
The tape could be moved forwards or backwards
inside of a machine called a tape drive.
Inside is a write head, which passes current
through a wound wire to generate a magnetic
field, causing a small section of the tape
to become magnetized.
The direction of the current sets the polarity,
again, perfect for storing 1’s and 0’s.
There was also a separate read head could
detect the polarity non-destructively.
The UNIVAC used half-inch-wide tape with 8
parallel data tracks, each able to store 128
bits of data per inch.
With each reel containing 1200 feet of tape,
it meant you could store roughly 15 million
bits – that’s almost 2 megabytes!
Although tape drives were expensive, the magnetic
tape itself was cheap and compact, and for
this reason, they’re still used today for
archiving data.
The main drawback is access speed.
Tape is inherently sequential, you have to
rewind or fast-forward to get to data you
want.
This might mean traversing hundreds of feet
of tape to retrieve a single byte, which is
slow.
A related popular technology in the 1950s
and 60s was Magnetic Drum Memory.
This was a metal cylinder – called a drum
– coated in a magnetic material for recording data.
The drum was rotated continuously, and positioned along its length were dozens of read and write heads.
These would wait for the right spot to rotate underneath them to read or write a bit of data.
To keep this delay as short as possible, drums
were rotated thousand of revolutions per minute!
By 1953, when the technology started to take
off, you could buy units able to record 80,000
bits of data – that’s 10 kilobytes, but
the manufacture of drums ceased in the 1970s.
However, Magnetic Drums did directly lead
to the development of Hard Disk Drives, which
are very similar, but use a different geometric
configuration.
Instead of large cylinder, hard disks use,
well… disks… that are hard.
Hence the name!
The storage principle is the same, the surface
of a disk is magnetic, allowing write and
read heads to store and retrieve 1’s and
0’s.
The great thing about disks is that they are
thin, so you can stack many of them together,
providing a lot of surface area for data storage.
That’s exactly what IBM did for the world's
first computer with a disk drive: the RAMAC 305.
Sweet name BTW.
It contained fifty, 24-inch diameter disks,
offering a total storage capacity of roughly
5 megabytes.Yess!!
We’ve finally gotten to a technology that
can store a single smartphone photo!
The year was 1956.
To access any bit of data, a read/write head
would travel up or down the stack to the right
disk, and then slide in between them.
Like drum memory, the disks are spinning,
so the head has to wait for the right section
to come around.
The RAMAC 305 could access any block of data,
on average, in around 6/10ths of a second,
what’s called the seek time.
While great for storage, this was not nearly
fast enough for memory, so the RAMAC 305 also
had drum memory and magnetic core memory.
This is an example of a memory hierarchy,
where you have a little bit of fast memory,
which is expensive, slightly more medium-speed
memory, which is less expensive, and then
a lot of slowish memory, which is cheap.
This mixed approach strikes a balance between
cost and speed.
Hard disk drives rapidly improved and became
commonplace by the 1970s.
A hard disk like this can easily hold 1 terabyte
of data today – that’s a trillion bytes
– or roughly 200,000 five megabyte photos!
And these types of drives can be bought online
for as little as 40 US dollars.
That’s 0.0000000005 cents per bit.
A huge improvement over core memory’s 1
cent per bit!
Also, modern drives have an average seek time
of under 1/100th of a second.
I should also briefly mention a close cousin
of hard disks, the floppy disk, which is basically
the same thing, but uses a magnetic medium
that’s, floppy.
You might recognise it as the save icon on
some of your applications, but it was once
a real physical object!
It was most commonly used for portable storage,
and became near ubiquitous from the mid 1970s
up to the mid 90s.
And today it makes a pretty good coaster.
Higher density floppy disks, like Zip Disks,
became popular in the mid 1990s, but fell
out of favor within a decade.
Optical storage came onto the scene in 1972,
in the form of a 12-inch “laser disc.”
However, you are probably more familiar with
its later, smaller, are more popular cousin,
the Compact Disk, or CD, as well as the DVD which took off in the 90s.
Functionally, these technologies are pretty
similar to hard disks and floppy disks, but
instead of storing data magnetically, optical
disks have little physical divots in their
surface that cause light to be reflected differently,
which is captured by an optical sensor, and
decoded into 1’s and 0’s.
However, today, things are moving to solid
state technologies, with no moving parts,
like this hard drive and also this USB stick.
Inside are Integrated Circuits, which we talked
about in Episode 15.
The first RAM integrated circuits became available
in 1972 at 1 cent per bit, quickly making
magnetic core memory obsolete.
Today, costs have fallen so far, that hard
disk drives are being replaced with non-volatile,
Solid State Drives, or SSDs, as the cool kids
say.
Because they contain no moving parts, they
don’t really have to seek anywhere, so SSD
access times are typically under 1/1000th
of a second.
That’s fast!
But it’s still many times slower than your
computer’s RAM.
For this reason, computers today still use
memory hierarchies.
So, we’ve come along way since the 1940s.
Much like transistor count and Moore’s law,
which we talked about in Episode 14, memory
and storage technologies have followed a similar
exponential trend.
From early core memory costing millions of
dollars per megabyte, we’re steadily fallen,
to mere cents by 2000, and only fractions
of a cent today.
Plus, there’s WAY less punch cards to keep
track of.
Seriously, can you imagine if there was a
slight breeze in that room containing the
SAGE program?
62,500 punch cards.
I don’t even want to think about it.
I'll see you next week.