Brave users of history’s earliest computers programmed those massive electronic beasts through jumper wires plugged into arrays of sockets. With so few computers in existence (none of them compatible ...

At my first office job in the mid-80s, we backed up the computer every night on reels of magnetic tape. Here, in a scene from a slide show of 1980s IBM mainframe computer ops (all set to a snappy ...

If you think of a 1960s mainframe computer, it’s likely that your mental image includes alongside the cabinets with the blinkenlights, a row of reel-to-reel tape drives. These refrigerator-sized units ...

For a middle-school music-appreciation class in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., in the late nineteen-seventies, our teacher asked each of us to bring in a piece of recorded music to play on the ...

Today, we live in a world of highly portable, highly functional electronic media devices of incredible capacity. The songs contained on boxes of 45 RPM records of yesteryear can now be downloaded from ...

You may think that computer tape memories died out before Rubik's cubes came in, but IBM and Fujifilm have teamed up to develop a record-breaking new sixth-generation tape storage system that can ...