storage

In 1982 the Microfloppy Industry Committee, a consortium ultimately of 23 media companies, agreed upon a 3½-inch media specification based upon but differing from the original Sony design. The first drives compatible with this new media specification were shipped in early 1983. In 1984 Apple Computer selected the format for their new Macintosh computers. Then, in 1985 Atari adopted it for their new ST line, and Commodore for their new Amiga. By 1988 the 3½-inch was outselling the 5¼-inch.

In 1976 at a meeting An Wang of Wang Laboratories informed Shugart Associates’s, Jim Adkisson and Don Massaro, that the 8-inch format was simply too large for the desktop word processing machines he was developing at the time. Adkinson and Massaro proposed a 5¼-inches wide format which Wang accepted. Shugart Associates then developed a new drive of this size storing 98.5 KB later increased to 110 KB by adding 5 tracks. The 5¼-inch drive was considerably less expensive than 8-inch drives from IBM, and soon started appearing on CP/M machines.

In 1967, IBM gave their San Jose, California storage development center a task to develop a simple and inexpensive system for loading microcode into their System/370 mainframes in a process called Initial Control Program Load (ICPL). The 370 was the first IBM computer to use read/write semiconductor memory for microcode, and whenever the power was turned off the microcode had to be reloaded (System/370's predecessor, System/360, used non-volatile read-only memory for microcode).

Blu-ray Disc (also known as BD or Blu-Ray) is an optical disc storage medium designed to supersede the standard DVD format.

The Compact Cassette, often referred to as audio cassette, cassette tape, cassette, or simply tape, is a magnetic tape sound recording format. Although originally designed for dictation, improvements in fidelity led the Compact Cassette to supplant reel-to-reel tape recording in most non-professional applications. Its uses ranged from portable audio to home recording to data storage for early microcomputers. Between the early 1970s and late 1990s, the cassette was one of the two most common formats for prerecorded music, first alongside the LP and later the Compact Disc.

A MiniDisc (MD) is a magneto-optical disc-based data storage device initially intended for storage of up to 80 minutes of digitized audio. Today, in the form of Hi-MD, it has developed into a general-purpose storage medium in addition to greatly expanding its audio roots.

Betacam is a family of half-inch professional videotape products. It was developed by Sony in 1982. In colloquial use, "Betacam" singly is often used to refer to a Betacam camcorder, a Betacam tape, a Betacam video recorder or the format itself.

The LaserDisc (LD) is a home video disc format, and was the first commercial optical disc storage medium. Initially marketed as Discovision in 1978, the technology was licensed and sold as Reflective Optical Videodisc, Laser Videodisc, Laservision, Disco-Vision, DiscoVision, and MCA DiscoVision until Pioneer Electronics purchased the majority stake in the format and marketed it as LaserDisc in the mid to late 1980s.

The videocassette recorder (or VCR, more commonly known in the UK and Ireland as the video recorder or video machine), is a type of video tape recorder that uses removable videotape cassettes containing magnetic tape to record audio and video from a television broadcast so it can be played back later. Most VCRs have their own tuner (for direct TV reception) and a programmable timer (for unattended recording of a certain channel at a particular time).

DVD, also known as Digital Versatile Disc or Digital Video Disc, is an optical disc storage media format, and was developed invented in 1995 by Sony, Panasonic and Samsung. Its main uses are video and data storage. DVDs are of the same dimensions as compact discs (CDs), but store more than six times as much data.

A Compact Disc (also known as a CD) is an optical disc used to store digital data. It was originally developed to store sound recordings exclusively, but later it also allowed the preservation of other types of data. Audio CDs have been commercially available since October 1982. In 2010, they remain the standard physical storage medium for audio.