Even before the first commercial computers appeared in 1951, "mass" storage, although minuscule by today's standards, was a necessity. As early as the mid-1800s, punch cards were used to provide input to early calculators and other machines. The 1940s ushered in the decade when vacuum tubes were used for storage until, finally, tape drives started to replace punch cards in the early 1950s. Only a couple of years later, magnetic drums appeared on the scene. …showed first 75 words of 984 total…

…showed last 75 words of 984 total…selected item from all this data in just a few thousandths of a second. What's more, a disk drive does all of this very inexpensively. By the early 1990s, the cost of purchasing a 200 MB hard disk drive had dropped below $200, or less than one dollar per megabyte. It is predicted that throughout the future years, the hard drive will become smaller, hold a larger capacity of data, and will be cheaper for the consumer.