These are the 108 rarest types of physical format to save files, surely you do not know them all

The computing world has many needs. But above all, it has storage needs. Hence, for 40 years, engineers have launched all kinds of formats to store information.

If you have a few gray hairs on your head, things like floppy disks, memory cards, cassette tapes, vinyl, VHS, punch cards, etc. will surely sound familiar to you.

over four decades the sector has been evolving and storage media have been emerging like mushrooms. For all existing markets: music, cinema, programming, computing and many more. There was a lot of life before today’s SSDs.

Hence, depending on what you wanted to save, you used one or another format. If it was vinyl you knew it was music, and if it was a floppy disk you knew it was a computer program.. Or well, you were almost always right, since we have seen everything.

Now the famous YouTube channel The 8-Bit Guy has brought a compilation of the best and rarest physical formats in the form of a 40-minute video that have existed in the technological world. And although there will be some that do sound familiar to you, we assure you that it is impossible for you to know them all.

To collect a few we have: an Edison cylinder, a 16″ vinyl, a flexidisc, an MCD cassette, an Iomega Click Disk, a betamax tape, an SD-Sony cassette, a punch card, a dataplay, a laserdisc, a Sinclair MicroDrive…

As you may have guessed, some of these formats date back to the 1970s, when computing was very rudimentary and nothing like what we have today, where everything is digital and stored on SSDs and Flash memory cards. It seems that even USB’s days are numbered.

For those of us who are not over 30, there are many of these supports that we have only seen in museums or documentaries, like punch cards, USB sticks from the 70s, when there was nothing more advanced than transmitting data literally on 0 and 1 (now there are 2TB SSDs that are 3cm long).

If you are curious or you like history the video is a work of art and a song to nostalgia, where we can see how much we have advanced in 40 years and where we come from, key when deciding what our next steps will be. Challenge for the very nostalgic and with a good memory.

Reference-computerhoy.com