11–20 of 190 posts
The biggest deal for these taking off was that they just worked on Windows without any special drivers or messing around. It made them appear magic. People lost their minds over how much easier and better they were than all the other stuff - burning CD's, floppy drives, zip disks, LS120 etc. You couldn't email large files and WeTransfer didn't exist. We couldn't get them in fast enough for the users where I worked at…
> global sales of thumb drives from all manufacturers surpassed $7 billion, a number that is expected to rise to more than $10 billion by 2028. More than 20 years later, they are indeed dirty cheap. However, I often find them to be unreliable with slow/unsteady real speeds. Meanwhile, small NVMe-based devices in either this thumb-format or SD-format (5 years in the making [1]) are still not very popular, so the price…
I can tell I'm getting older by the number of articles I read that take time to describe 'history' of things that seem obvious since I lived through them, like the explanation of how 3.5" high density 'Floppy disks' held up to 1.44MB. Like... "I know... oh god some people don't know that."
Made in China has changed a lot of things. It doesn't matter who really invented thumb drives. I think the first mass production/sale of thumb drives happened in China. That's the reason the patent was granted to Netac.
I guess this was one of those "inventions" which are pretty obvious in hindsight, and I bet more than one party had already though of building a USB drive, it was just a question of the USB interface becoming widespread enough and of flash memory becoming affordable and reliable enough. Actually, flash memory cards with proprietary interfaces were available for some time before the year 2000 given in the article (Com…
The biggest deal for these taking off was that they just worked on Windows without any special drivers or messing around. It made them appear magic. People lost their minds over how much easier and better they were than all the other stuff - burning CD's, floppy drives, zip disks, LS120 etc. You couldn't email large files and WeTransfer didn't exist. We couldn't get them in fast enough for the users where I worked at…
I can tell I'm getting older by the number of articles I read that take time to describe 'history' of things that seem obvious since I lived through them, like the explanation of how 3.5" high density 'Floppy disks' held up to 1.44MB. Like... "I know... oh god some people don't know that."
I mean to add, the article says that thumb drives are still hot and the market will grow by billions a year more in a few years, but... I haven't used a thumb drive in years. The only time I actually went to look for one was to plug it into a shitty digital picture frame, and that one would also accept SD cards.
It should also be noted that one of the reasons thumb drives took off when they did was not just due to USB.. as technically USB has been around for a few years and there were things like CF card readers coming on the market, and other flash storage readers a few years earlier.. so why did it take until later? Because Win 95 and Win 98 did not have plug and play drivers for USB mass storage devices, at all. I think i…
The USB physical form-factor and electrical signals were 1996 but the protocol for storage devices appears to be later in 1998:
Universal Serial Bus Mass Storage Class Specification Overview V1.0 Revision October 22, 1998 : https://cscott.net/usb_dev/data/devclass/usbmassover_10.pdf