From Clay To Cloud
A trip down the memory lane of externalised memory
Clay tablet containing cuneiform writing. Mesopotamia c. 2052 BC.
For civilisations and cultures to thrive it is absolutely essential to find ways to store information for later retrieval. In spite of the phenomenally flexible and expandable capacities of the human brain, the need for externalised fixation and storage of valuable information will inevitably arise. Let’s take a trip down memory lane of externalised memory!
The very first system of representational information storage is believed to be tokens of clay from Mesopotamia, the earliest of which is dated to around 8000 BC. The system was further developed and the small clay tokens took different shapes representing for example sheep, jars or grain and were used for commerce and trade. By around 3500 BC clay balls (or “envelopes” as researchers call them) containing these tokens begin to appear. These balls were probably functioning as an ancient form of a receipt of sorts in the trade business, with the contained tokens representing either numbers or goods. The clay balls are thereby believed to be the earliest evidence of complex numerical literacy, since the earliest known systems of writing first would appear 200 years later.
By 3300 BC, the balls had flattened into tablets and the tokens were replaced by representational marks drawn by a wedge stylus on the clay tablet surface. These signs could be abstracted representations of nouns (like the older tokens) but could also represent verbs of action as well. This system is the earliest form of the Cuneiform writing system, which was further developed from its early logographic (i.e., “rebus-like”) incarnations to a more abstracted phonographic writing system (i.e., “alphabet-like”) with each sign representing a sound. This development made ways for storage of much more complex information, by limiting the amount of signs needed to construct meaning, thus expanding the communication capabilities of the writing system from trade and commerce to all kinds of diplomatic and official communication. The alphabet would, in its many different forms, turn out to be a remarkably long-lasting method for inscription of information into whatever storage medium was in fashion at the given time of history.
The Rosetta-stone was discovered in 1799 in the Nile Delta near the town of Rashid (Rosetta). The inscribed text, which is a decree dated 196 BC and issued at Memphis in Egypt, appears three times in three different scripts: Egyptian hieroglyphs, demotic script, and ancient greek. The texts covering the entire face of the stone are considered the first bilingual (trilingual even) Egyptian text recovered in modern times, and has as such been instrumental in the understanding of ancient sign-systems. Linking the well-known greek alphabet with demotic script and ancient hieroglyphs has provided valuable insights especially in the occasional use of phonographic characters in logographic sign systems like the Egyptian hieroglyphs. The shift from symbolic to alphabetic script made great improving impact on textual information storage media by limiting the amount of signs needed while at the same time making it possible to communicate more abstract and complex information than ever before. Foto: ©Hans Hillewaert / CC
Conveniency and Accessibility
The next important development in the history of information storage was the replacement of the impractically heavy and inefficient wet-surface clay tablet by the much lighter and convenient dry-surface papyrus. When rolled into large scrolls the papyri can contain much larger amounts of information. For centuries these continuous scrolls were the preferred medium for information storage, until the codex came along around the turn of the first century AD. The codex was a stack of sheets bound together; essentially what we today call a book. The codex holds a significant advantage when compared to the scroll: the possibility of non-linear reading. The scroll is a rigidly sequential information storage medium, where a reader would have to scroll through the entire text in order to read the last words in the text. With the codex you could start reading wherever you wanted and easily skip chunks of texts.
printed book in its current form based on the codex (c. 100 ad) and the printing press
Despite all of its technological advantages, the codex still had a significant drawback: It was laborious, time-consuming and consequentially costly to produce. This prevented mass production of codexes and denied it the potential of becoming the mass communication medium, we have come to know as the book. This problem was not solved until the invention of the printing press by the renowned Johannes Gutenberg in 1439. His invention would make way for the book (or smaller pamphlets) to become the dominant information storage medium for centuries to come, by making the production of books much faster, cheaper and less error prone. It is no exaggeration to suggest, that the invention of the printing press and the many inventions built upon it (notably the hot metal typesetting machines) is among the most influential events in human history.
The Search for Multimediality
But in this brief tour of the history of information storage we cannot dwell at this remarkable event, since the industrial revolution and later on the electronic and digital revolutions has made the important events in the history of information storage take place within exceedingly shorter timespans. Throughout the nineteenth century there were a lot of experimentations going on in trying to go multimedia—to find ways to store not only textual information but also visual, audible and audiovisual information. In the first half of the century photography was invented, which for the first time made it possible to capture an accurate image (though without colours at first) of a visual scene without having to manually replicate it by painting, drawing or engraving. Later on phonography made it possible to record audio and store it for later retrieval and by the turn of the century the invention of cinematography provided ways to store and playback moving images, which again was developed further by adding the simultaneous recording of sound.
the most widely used punched card format designed by ibm
The last addition to the history of information storage from pre-20th century, that should be mentioned here is the punched card. This technology represents the first instance of computational information or data storage. The holes (and “NOT holes”) in the cards is a coded information needing to be decoded by something other than the human brain (i.e., computed) in order to be useful. In its early implementations this technology found use in storage of textile patterns weaved (or decoded) by looms and storage of music played (or decoded) by organs or pianos. These examples reveal the potential media versatility offered by the punched cards-technology. The types of data possible to store is only limited by the language in which it is coded and the capabilities of the “computer” performing the decoding process.
At the turn of the century the engineer and inventor Herman Hollerith introduced a system of punched paper cards which was “readable” by tabulating machines. His Tabulator Machine Company later merged to become IBM. This brings us into the age of computational data storage, which has developed rapidly through the twentieth century.
compact cassette or musicassette, developed by philips for audio storage
hard disc drive with the 3.5 inch form factor first introduced by the company rodime
The Age of Tapes and Discs
The second generation of computational data storage was based on reels of magnetic tape. At first it was used to record analog audio and later on for the recording of video. The most popular and widespread uses of this particular technology was the Compact Cassette format introduced in 1962 and the VHS (Video Home System) format introduced in 1976. These types of cassettes containing reel to reel magnetic tape was for decades the preferred standard format in the entertainment industry for distributing music and video in a convenient, cheap and compact format. The Compact Cassette format was also used in the 80’s and early 90’s for data storage with 8-bit computers like the Commodore 64. And even today, magnetic tape formats are developed and used for long term storage of large amounts of data in the industry, such as the LTO Ultrium-cartridges with a data capacity of 2,5 TB.
The next generation was the magnetic disc, which was used in the first hard disc drive invented in 1954. To this day the same basic technology is utilised in the internal HDDs (Hard Disc Drive) of modern day computers, even though the heyday of these drives might soon be coming to an end. The hard disc drives are—due to their relatively big physical size (and in the first days they were really big) and motion sensitivity—typically built into the computer. A more flexible and portable data storage medium was needed. The floppy disc (in its different incarnations) came along as a mobile version of the magnetic spinning disc drive and became the default medium for people to exchange and distribute digital data for almost two decades; the eighties and the better part of the nineties.
3.5 inch floppy disc or diskette introduced with the capacity of 264 kb
But gradually the limitations of magnetic storage (limited capacity and fragility) made way for a new generation of storage media: optical discs. In the nineties the Compact Cassettes were replaced by the CD (Compact Disc) as the preferred medium of the music industry. Later on the DVD (Digital Versatile Disc) replaced the VHS-tape for storage of video. And gradually the CD-ROM (Read--Only Memory) and CD-RW (ReWritable) made its way into the area of multi medial digital data storage due to their superior data capacity. But the optical technology has significant drawbacks, when it comes to deleting and rewriting data. Even though CD burners became commonplace, it was a cumbersome and time consuming process, when compared to the much older magnetic floppy disc media.
Possession lost into thin Air
The next generation of non-volatile data storage media was Flash technology, which was invented at Toshiba as early as 1984. But the technology wasn’t ready for the consumer market until the mid 90’s, when the first flash based memory card formats was introduced, and subsequently widely adopted as storage medium primarily in digital cameras and other portable digital devices. Around the same time the first flash based SSDs (Solid State Drive) were introduced. But due to their limited capacity and high price, they weren’t able to rival the conventional magnetic HDDs until around 2010, when they gained popularity primarily in the portable computer market, due to a range of significant advantages such as reduced size/weight, higher data access speed, less power consumption and better shock resistance.
usb flash driveintroduced as “thumbdrive” or “diskonkey”
In the meantime—the first ten years of the new millennium—it was another flash based data storage medium, the USB flash drive, which took over the position from the ageing floppy discs, as the dominant means for the average user to store and transfer digital information. Due to the standardisation and wide adoption of the USB-port, the steadily increasing capacity and the decreasing price these small devices became the—probably last—symbol of a medium for physical handling of digital information.
Keywords in that preceding sentence are last and physical handling, since there is (at least) one significant technological development related to information storage, which so far has been completely overlooked: the connection of computers (and subsequently: their storage media) in networks.
The story of computer networks reaches far beyond the focus in this text, but suffice it to say that the most important components from the everyday users’ point of view are the development and widespread adoption of the Internet and the steadily increasing network access bandwidth as well as wireless network coverage. These components have made way for a proliferation of distributed data storage services, by which users are able conveniently and inexpensively (if not for free) to access, store and distribute information at a remote and in most cases mysteriously unknown physical location—commonly (and quite aptly) described as the Cloud. Cloud services are now integrated in most software, so users normally wouldn’t need to save on local storage media. And if data is saved locally it will in many cases be easily distributed and synchronised on cloud services as well.
Historical Accounts And Causal Structures
This completes the long but exhaustingly paced journey from Clay to Cloud. In a tour de force like this some oversimplifications and erroneous causal structures may occur. It would be beneficial in these concluding remarks to accentuate one particular underlying premise often presupposed in the characterisation of technological progress: the quasi-Darwinian view on progress, as described by Nicholas Carr in his latest book, The Glass Cage (2014):
“Many different technologies are invented, they compete for users and buyers, and after a period of rigorous testing and comparison the marketplace chooses the best of the bunch. Only the fittest tools survive. Society can thus be confident that the technologies it employs are the optimum ones—and that the alternatives discarded along the way were flawed in some fatal way.”
As any reader could easily assess, I am as guilty as anyone in presuming this simplistic view on technological progress. But the following comments from Carr makes for a valuable and sobering critique:
“It’s a reassuring view of progress, founded on, in the words of the late historian David Noble, ‘a simple faith in objective science, economic rationality, and the market.’ But as Noble went on to explain in his 1984 book Forces of Production, it’s a distorted view: ‘It portrays technological development as an autonomous and neutral technical process, on the one hand, and a coldly rational and self-regulating process, on the other, neither of which accounts for people, power, institutions, competing values, or different dreams.’ In place of the complexities, vagaries, and intrigues of history, the prevailing view of technological progress presents us with a simplistic, retrospective fantasy.”
Abstracted Accessibility or Sensory Stationarity
While these words may at times have been “simplistic retrospective fantasy”, I would like to end by making some short and subjective observations for you, dear reader who stuck with me to the bitter end, to consider:
The history of information storage is not only a story about progression and improvement, but also a story of the increasing abstraction and detachment of information: From the sensory solidity of the clay tokens in my camel bag to the abstracted and encrypted bits of my email login credentials “located” in the cloud wherever that might be. This could possibly also be described as an esoterification of information, i.e., a process in which the information gets abstracted away into the “cloudy” and technologically walled garden of intangible data entities. As William H. Gass wrote in the article In Defence of the Book (1999): Words on a digital device “have no materiality, they are only shadows, and when the light shifts they’ll be gone. Off the screen they do not exists as words. They do not wait to be reseen, reread; they only wait to be remade, relit.” The words have in some way exceeded our possession, making them harder for us to grasp—physically and subsequently mentally.
At the same time it is a story of an increasing accessibility and liquidity of information: From the fixed heaviness and non-massproducability of the papyrus scroll to the inherent accessibility, interactivity and reproducibility of the web hosted hypertext. The intangibility of the data has as such also been beneficial for the access to obtaining information as well as the access to publishing information. What Gutenberg’s invention meant for the liberalisation and democratisation of consuming information, the digital technology (and the web in particular) meant for the liberalisation and democratisation of publishing information. Information is flowing in a pervasive global stream at a pace and scale like never before. While this development is liberating and potentially disrupting societal structures and repressive regimes, on the individual level the never ending information stream can be experienced as exhausting and overwhelming.
Alas, there are cases to be made for both storage on physical media, making the information decode-able and easily comprehensible by the literate human brain, as well as on digital ‘cloudy’ media, making the information decode-able and applicable by computational technology. At 2K/DENMARK we devote our time and energy in designing both sensational and sensory books as well as accessible digital products and services.
Selected events in the history of information storage
Some timestamps of invention and further development might be debatable
c. 8000 BC Mesopotamian clay tokens
first representational information system
c. 3300 BC Cuneiform writing on clay tablets
first alphabet-like information system
c. 2500 BC Papyrus scrolls
sequential access to textual information
c. 100 AD Codex
random access to textual information
1439 Printing press
mass production of textual information
1839 Photography
storage of visual information
1877 Phonography
storage of auditory information
c. 1890 Cinematography
storage of moving visual information
c. 1890 Punched card
first computational information storage
1928 Magnetic tape
1928 reel-to-reel audio storage
1951 reel-to-reel video and data storage
1962 Compact Cassette / MC (Musicassette)
1976 VHS (Video Home System)
1989 DDS (Digital Data Storage)
2000 LTO-Ultrium (Linear Tape-Open)
1954 Magnetic disc
1954 hard disc drive invented
(earliest capacity 3.75 MB)
1971 8-inch floppy disc
(earliest capacity 80 KB)
1976 5 1/4 floppy disc
(earliest capacity 110 KB)
1982 3 1/2 floppy disc
(earliest capacity 280 KB)
1994 Zip drive (earliest capacity 100 MB)
1995 Jaz drive (earliest capacity 1 GB)
1981 Optical disc
1981 Compact Disc (CD)
1985 CD-ROM
1997 cD-ReWritable
1989 MiniDisc (MD) – magneto-optical
1995 Digital Versatile Disc (DVD)
2002 Blu-ray Disc (BD)
1994 Flash based storage
1994 first flash based memory cards
(earliest capacity 2 MB)
1995 first flash based solid state ‘drives’
1999 first USB flash ‘drives’
(earliest capacity 8 MB)
c. 2000 Cloud storage
Gradually evolving towards ubiquity of hardware and
software. Based on earlier inventions, e.g. point-to-point
binary transfer protocols (1977), world wide web (1990)
and the continuing increases in network access bandwidth
and wireless network coverage.