What did the first Soviet ‘flash drive’ look like?

Anastasia Bliznyuk

This rarity is stored in Novosibirsk ‘Akademgorodok’, in the Institute of Computational Mathematics and Mathematical Geophysics.

Anastasia Bliznyuk

In the 1960s-1980s, there was a Computing Center there, the largest computer park for collective use in the USSR. Its facilities were used by scientific institutes of Novosibirsk.

Data was recorded on punched cards using a certain sequence of "holes".

Anastasia Bliznyuk

The employees of scientific institutes had many such punched cards that needed to be processed on a computer. They all brought their "flash drives" to the Computing Center in boxes. Each Soviet "flash drive" weighed several kilograms.

Anastasia Bliznyuk

Of course, with the advent of personal computers, the need for large computer centers disappeared and punched cards became museum exhibits.

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