History
The word "file" was used publicly in the context of computer storage as early as February, 1950. In an RCA (Radio Corporation of America) advertisement in Popular Science Magazine describing a new "memory" vacuum tube it had developed, RCA stated:
- "...the results of countless computations can be kept "on file" and taken out again. Such a "file" now exists in a "memory" tube developed at RCA Laboratories. Electronically it retains figures fed into calculating machines, holds them in storage while it memorizes new ones - speeds intelligent solutions through mazes of mathematics."
In 1952 "file" was used in referring to information stored on punched cards. In early usage people regarded the underlying hardware (rather than the contents) as the file. For example, the IBM 350 disk drives were called "disk files". Systems like the Compatible Time-Sharing System introduced the concept of a file system, which managed several virtual "files" on one storage device, giving the term its present-day meaning. File names in CTSS had two parts, a user-readable "primary name" and a "secondary name" indicating the file type. This convention remains in use by several operating systems today, including Microsoft Windows. Although the current term "register file" shows the early concept of files, it has largely disappeared.
Read more about this topic: Computer File
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“It is my conviction that women are the natural orators of the race.”
—Eliza Archard Connor, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 9, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)