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Who invented the thumb drive?

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Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#41

Post by epicide »

wongarsu wrote: post #12
CrypticShift wrote: post #3

> 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…

There is more than a 10x price difference between slow run-of-the-mill sd cards and the high speed cards a photographer might go for. Why would it be any different for thumb drives? Higher speeds are more difficult to achieve and make up a small fraction of the total demand. And to make it worse people who need speed tend to be less price sensitive.

I ran into this sort of issue with the Steam Deck, too. Initially ordered a slower-but-still-recommended cheaper SD card. Figured I could deal with the slower write speeds as that should just mean slower downloads.

I loved the Steam Deck from the onset, but was always confused why nobody mentioned how slow and unresponsive the main menus were... Yeah, hindsight is 20/20.

Games still ran fine off of the slower card, but every part of the experience saw a dramatic improvement after I switched to a higher-spec SD card.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#42

Post by narag »

wkjagt wrote: post #23
mk_stjames wrote: post #8

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 actually went through this yesterday! I opened a new (still in plastic!) box of HD “floppies” to make a bootable disk for my 486. I sent a picture of it to a friend and he replied “how big are these? 512k?”. I too thought it was common knowledge, the number 1.44 burned into my brain forever, but I do give my friend credit for being at least in the right ballpark, and also to come up with another number that has gee…

The first computer I bought was a 386. But I tried the used machine market before, to see if it was possible to save some money.

My father drove me to a company that had their used system for sale. It was embedded in a desk, the screen was minuscule.

I don't know what impressed me more: that when I asked (politely, looking for a reason to walk without offending the seller) how much memory it had, they started counting bytes included in the manual, or the 8'' floppies. Those were big.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#43

Post by LeifCarrotson »

pdntspa wrote: post #38
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can always tell the DJ at the party because they are wearing headphones and a USB drive on their neck Though all this cloud DJ shit is trying to change that. I hope it doesn't take

"Sorry the audio buffered and cut out there, apparently the guest wifi and my cellular backup are both congested. If y'all would set your phones to airplane mode we might be able to get better audio quality..."

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#44

Post by shagie »

I've got an early generation portable USB drive that I've kept for some nostalgia.

https://imgur.com/2XcXCPe - its 128 MB.

I purchased in '96 (or maybe '97). You'll note that it is orange which indicated solid state. There was also a black one which had a spinning disk in that same form factor and held 256 MB.

I used it a few times in between 2010 and 2015 for transferring a file around sneaker net. You'll note that the USB plug is on a short cord - the places where I had to plug it in didn't always allow for easily inserting a short rectangular stick - they either stuck out too far for where the computer was or required moving other things out of the way. This one let me plug it in with minimal obstruction to other things in a cluttered USB port area.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#45

Post by Kye »

pdntspa wrote: post #38
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can always tell the DJ at the party because they are wearing headphones and a USB drive on their neck Though all this cloud DJ shit is trying to change that. I hope it doesn't take

If I were a DJ, I wouldn't want to trust the club's wifi for loading stuff.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#46

Post by pdntspa »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #43
pdntspa wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can always tell the DJ at the party because they are wearing headphones and a USB drive on their neck Though all this cloud DJ shit is trying to change that. I hope it doesn't take

"Sorry the audio buffered and cut out there, apparently the guest wifi and my cellular backup are both congested. If y'all would set your phones to airplane mode we might be able to get better audio quality..."

Yeah I really wanna see someone try that kind of bullshit at some big event out in the middle of the desert

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#47

Post by Kye »

balderdash wrote: post #39
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I rarely use them but still see them used a fair amount being overnighted/couriered as a fail safe/easy way to share large amounts of data.

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum

https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#48

Post by CobaltFire »

egberts1 wrote: post #26
bheadmaster wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/949/

To upgrade an old saying: Never underestimate the power of a Tesla Electric Truck carrying 4 tons of 32TB USB sticks barreling down the highway from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Still beats the fastest bandwidth of the latest satellite laser LAN.

Not everything needs to have Musks companies shoehorned in.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#49

Post by kevinmhickey »

egberts1 wrote: post #26
bheadmaster wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/949/

To upgrade an old saying: Never underestimate the power of a Tesla Electric Truck carrying 4 tons of 32TB USB sticks barreling down the highway from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Still beats the fastest bandwidth of the latest satellite laser LAN.

Thumb drives in a truck offer great bandwidth but terrible latency.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#50

Post by marcosdumay »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #14
mk_stjames wrote: post #8

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's like floppies at the late 00's. You never need them, except for those 5 or 6 fringe use cases that nobody else has (everybody has some 5 or 6 of them).

If our computers were actually able to connect with each other, we would be using phones for everything already. But they can't, and phones are so user hostile that it's not obvious that you can even read your data in any way.

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