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Who invented the thumb drive?

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Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#61

Post by wil421 »

Raed667 wrote: post #36
narag wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, for me it helps replacing another device that I canned twenty years ago: the printer. Every time I need to print something to feed some troglodite's requirement, I put a pdf in a pincho and go down the street to the call shop. 20 cents is absurdly expensive, but much less than maintaining a printer for one paper sheet a month at most.

Oh I remember the era of giving your thumb drives all possible viruses every time you needed to print. I was recently pleasantly surprised that the shop with a printer down the street refuses to take any USBs and only prints what you email them.

Newer photo booths connect to your device using a WiFi hotspot to transfer your photos. Last time all I did was scan a QR code that basically connected to a WiFi network and opened a Kodak page served by the booth.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#62

Post by cbm-vic-20 »

Kye wrote: post #47
balderdash wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Amazon has a dedicated shipping container service for moving large amounts of data into / out of AWS. Anyone ever seen/used one of these?

https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#63

Post by porkbeer »

epicide wrote: post #41
wongarsu wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, b…

Just watch the video on disassembly and install a m.2. So much faster than an sd card. Its a 5/10 fiddly i hear. Ive yet to open mine but I bought the baller option. My steam controller was reasonably easy with a small plastic tool for prying, also available as automotive trim removers cheaply.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#65

Post by TeMPOraL »

brettermeier wrote: post #56
TeMPOraL wrote: post #54

I'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,…

How do you install a fresh copy of Windows?

It's been years since I've done that. But I still keep a stack of USB sticks that I bought (or got as freebies from conferences) some 8-12 years ago, some of which have enough space for a Windows or Linux ISO to fit.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#66

Post by cm2187 »

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.

Still useful to install OS on physical machines.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#67

Post by nopenopenopeno »

narag wrote: post #25
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.

Funny, for me it helps replacing another device that I canned twenty years ago: the printer. Every time I need to print something to feed some troglodite's requirement, I put a pdf in a pincho and go down the street to the call shop. 20 cents is absurdly expensive, but much less than maintaining a printer for one paper sheet a month at most.

Get a black and white Brother laser printer. It's super affordable, costs almost no money or time to maintain, and always works.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#68

Post by cm2187 »

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."

Then count the number of years between your birth and now vs your birth and ww2!

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#69

Post by 5e92cb50239222b »

brettermeier wrote: post #56
TeMPOraL wrote: post #54

I'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,…

How do you install a fresh copy of Windows?

Create a FAT32 partition on your SSD/HDD, unpack your .iso there, and you should be able to boot from it. You typically don't have to mark it as an ESP partition. It works on most motherboards, but not all.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#70

Post by ivanmontillam »

jabbany wrote: post #22
mk_stjames wrote: post #13

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…

Hmm, I remember still having to install individual drivers for USB thumb drives/sticks on our stock 98SE install. It was only until we "upgraded" to WinME that USB mass storage largely became plug-and-play. (Though, I think you could grab the winme usb drivers and plop them into a 98 install to get universal-ish usb mass storage, and later drives just ended up bundling a generic driver instead of a device specific on…

I remember that and I also remember as well some thumb drives that went ahead an emulated a CD-ROM drive in another partition with the driver installer.

After installing that driver you'd be able to see the other partition.

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