With Toshiba’s announcement of an actual shipping laptop with a 128-GB solid-state drive inside, it seems that the hard drive, in portable computers at least, might be in the twilight of its life. In the tech game, everything dies eventually, but some things are more fondly remembered than others.

8-Track

The 8-Track enjoyed some success, which is probably why it is so roundly ridiculed now — it’s tough to laugh at things we don’t remember. The 8-Track, born in 1963, was so called because it had eight tracks across one strip of tape inside. The tape was on an endless loop, spooling from the center and returning to the outside, and after the tape made a full revolution, the playhead was moved to the next strip.

Edward Lear’s (yes, the airplane guy) invention was cheap and portable, and as we know, ended up popular in cars. What it wasn’t was reliable or in any way high-fidelity. Shoddy manufacture and the inherent inaccuracies (those moving playback heads, remember?) meant that the finicky carts soon lost out to the cassette tape.

Punched Tape

An average modern hard drive holds around 500 GB. The first commercial hard drive, made by IBM back in 1956, had around four and a half megabytes. The punched tape gave 4K of storage for every ten meters (32 feet). Originally used to control looms in textile factories, punched tape ended up being used to feed instructions into and out of early computers. We guess that theoretically you could encode a movie onto punched tape, but a quick reckoning using this chart tells us we would need a reel over 1,100 miles long.

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Zip Disks

The precursor, in spirit at least, to the modern pen drive, the Zip Disk was a floppy on acid. Instead of a lame one megabyte (1.44 if you’re counting), the Zip Disk topped out at 750 MB by the end of its life. At this time, the Sony-designed 3.5" floppy was king, pushed into the mainstream by the original Mac, and the Zip was bigger, faster and actually pretty cheap. The first 100MB disks cost around $20.

As a proprietary format, though, it died, replaced by rewritable CDs. Now we live in a USB world, connecting anything to your computer is free, and with the exception of memory cards, almost nothing requires a special read/write device.

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Cassette Tape

Beeeeeeeee BIP! Beeeeeee biblibliblyibly. That is the noise of a program loading from a cassette tape into a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. The idea was, theoretically (and quite literally) sound: Tape recorders were cheap and plentiful, as were the cassettes they used. In practice, though, the analog nature of the format meant that performance was poor.

I get impatient these days when Photoshop takes more than a few seconds to launch. Back in the '80s I had to wait for between five and 10 minutes to load a game. Add to that degradation of the tapes with use, and forever having to balance the volume control at the right level, and you were just as likely to see the dreaded error message “R Tape Loading Error” as you were to see the splash screen of Manic Miner.

Cassettes had one major advantage to us cash strapped schoolboys, though. You could hook two players together and make tape-to-tape recordings. It was possible to fit a friend’s entire library onto a couple of C-90s.

MiniDisc

Another proprietary format from Sony, and another one which has almost died. At least Sony licensed this one to other manufacturers, but until recently Sony couldn’t stand to dirty its players with a filthy format like MP3 and insisted on its own ATRAC.

When they first appeared in 1992, MiniDiscs were cool. Much more high tech than a cassette, the chunky little disks were both satisfying to clunk into the machine while at the same time looking like something from the future. Indeed, as Clarke’s Third Law almost states, “Any sufficiently Japanese technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

The players, too were quite special to those of us used to the Walkman. Tiny in comparison, the MD players could also skip tracks and display song information. Easy to scoff at now but quite a feature back then. Of course, the format died, although MiniDiscs are still used for recording, and probably by retro hipsters on fixie trikes, wearing fashionable faux comb-overs along with their old tech.

That’s five already? Writing this list made me realize just how many formats have been killed by newer generations, left gathering dust as their data slowly spills into the gutters of Disk* Row.

There’s DAT, all kinds of floppies, Jaz Drives, quadrophonic LPs, wax cylinders, vacuum tubes, U-matic, Hi-8, the list is possibly endless. So instead of you chaps pointing out in the comments what I have missed, tell us a story — some retro-storage disaster, or how a particularly well-made mixtape helped you score. Go.

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