History of storage: Cuneiform tablets to flash
Summary: Come with ZDNet UK on a brisk stroll through the history of storage: our culture's push to give our discoveries, memories and knowledge lives and power of their own
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Mercury delay line
Mercury delay line
An unusual and marginally practicable data storage system, mercury delay lines were invented for use in second world war radar systems and subsequently saw service in early computers. This one was used in the Lyon's Electronic Office computer, Leo 1, in the early 1950s.
Mercury delay lines store information as a series of ultrasonic pulses sent from one end of a column of mercury to the other. They could store around 500 bits of information, but were difficult to drive and had to be kept in uncomfortably warm surroundings to be efficient.
The same principle, using quartz delay lines, could be found in European colour TV sets until the early 1990s: it's also been proposed that the reflectors left by Apollo astronauts on the Moon could allow the space between it and the Earth to be used as a laser-delay storage system.
Credit: Marcin Wichary/Flickr
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Talkback
The history of printing is complex and China and other parts of Asia were the first to print on paper and even developed movable type.
See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing
Also the Russians are actually Europeans... Since Europe is defined as that part of Eurasia to the West of the Ural mountains. That area (West of the Ural Mountains) in the far east of Europe is where ethnic Russians first emerged and where most of them still live to this day, it is called Russia. If you talk about the modern Russian federation or the old Russian Empire or Soviet Russia then you have to include Siberia and parts of Central Asia