CW@50: Data storage comes into its own

[ Editor's note: This is the second and last part of our story about the storage industry's evolution over the past 50 years. Part 1 is here.]In 1973, CDC saw a chance to one-up IBM and produced the 9760 Storage Module Drive (SMC). It held 40MB of data and represented the first significant departure from IBM standards for disk storage media.While increasing the capacity of its drives, CDC and others were also decreasing the gap between a read/write head and the magnetic platters on which data wa