ABSTRACT
M ASS STORAGE for computer systems originally used magnetic tape to
record information. Remington Rand, manufacturer of the Remington type-
writer and the UNIVAC mainframe computer (and originally part of the Remington
Arms company), built the first tape drive, the UNISERVO, as part of a UNIVAC sys-
tem sold to the U.S. Census Bureau in 1951. The original tapes were 1,200 feet long
and held 224KB of data, equivalent to approximately 20,000 punch cards. Although
popular until just a few years ago due to their high storage capacity, tape drives are
inherently linear in how they transfer data, making them inefficient for anything other
than reading or writing large blocks of sequential data.
