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…
Who invented the thumb drive?
51–60 of 190 posts
Re: Who invented the thumb drive?
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, floppies were pretty easy, just had no capacity.
Not to mention little reliability, especially in the latter years. Things got progressively worse going from 5¼" ~170K single-sided CBM-1541 to 5¼" 360K double-sided to 5¼" 1.2M to 3½" 720 to 3½" 1.44M. I never really used 8" floppies due to the lack of hardware so I can't say whether those were better or worse than their 5¼" successors but the hardware and (especially) media took a downturn in the latter years of th…
(I boot it a few times a year, mostly to show younger colleagues that whining about how terribly dated the PS4 is now that the PS5 is (somewhat) available won't get them much sympathy from someone who played games on the C64 in the mid-eighties...)
So, at least one data point for a carelessly stored floppy from a name brand still doing what it is expected to more than a third of a century later!
Re: Who invented the thumb drive?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also a good guess because if I remember correctly the floppy floppy disks which were flatter with a larger surface area and actually floppy were about 512k or so. I only ever saw one machine with one of those in though and of course it was at school, running useless software for us
For PC I remember the 5.25" were 1.2MB. Not actually bad capacity comparatively. Or 612KB for single sided. Though Wikipedia lists quite wide range of sizes none at 512KB.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#Sizes,_performance...
Though it all happened in a few years, when the 3.5 came out most if not all the 5.25 were already 1.2MB, and the first 3.5 were advertised for their robustness, not for their capacity (which was initially inferior).
Re: Who invented the thumb drive?
#54In recent years, for the occasional need to physically move some files, I've been using my phone as USB storage. Or, in the very rare case that isn't enough, a portable HDD or portable SSD drive.
EDIT: As mentioned in a reply, I still have a bunch of USB sticks I bought bought some 8-12 years ago, before counterfeiting was that big of a deal. In a very rare case I need to make a bootable drive, I reach into the desk drawer and dust one off.
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[0] - That's one of the nastiest form of fraud/counterfeiting I've ever experienced in the computing space. Less performant or even less functional hardware is one thing, but a 256 MB USB stick that pretends to be a 4 GB one will happily accept the first few files a typical user would put on it, lulling them into false sense of security, and then silently drop everything that's over 256 MB - a fact the user would only discover when trying to read back the data they "stored" on the USB stick, often days later, long after deleting the original files. I imagine it still beats ransomware on the metric of "priceless photos of loved ones forever lost, because some asshole thought they found a clever way to make money".
Re: Who invented the thumb drive?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, floppies were pretty easy, just had no capacity.
They were also vastly more error prone. Maybe my experience isn't representative, but floppy drives were always janky, and floppy discs failed all the time, while I can't remember a USB drive ever dying. I lost lots of files on floppies.
Most flash drives which seemingly randomly failed were of the cheap tradeshow variety.
Re: Who invented the thumb drive?
#56I'm surprised that the market for this is hot. Who is still buying USB sticks or SD cards? I haven't in quite a while, because I don't know who to trust anymore: cheaper variants are likely to be those counterfeits with hacked metadata that advertise having 4-10x the capacity they have[0], and more expensive ones are a crapshoot wrt. performance. In recent years, for the occasional need to physically move some files,…
Re: Who invented the thumb drive?
#57Re: Who invented the thumb drive?
#58The 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…
> 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. Uh? I had to install drivers to make them work. So I could not just bring one with me and assume I'd be able to read it wherever I went.
Re: Who invented the thumb drive?
#59I'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…
Re: Who invented the thumb drive?
#60Earlier 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.