Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Who invented the thumb drive?

spectrum.ieee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 190 posts

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#101

Post by russdill »

rob74 wrote: post #10

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…

Yes, I think the use of the term "invented" as well as the idea that the invention was unfairly copied are a bit disingenuous. Credit where credit is due. Pulling together the different technologies and making them into a manufactural product is a great accomplishment. If there were inventions involved it would be the USB protocol, there mass storage specification, and of course flash memory. The thumb drive just brought those things together.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#102

Post by paul7986 »

In 2015 on a reality TV show about inventors (Americas Greatest Maker created by Intel and Mark Burnett) I pitched two phones sharing battery power (reverse wireless charging).

In 2018 Huwaeii was the first to introduce into the market via their Mate 20 Pro. Samsung added it a year later in a Galaxy Phone calling it "Wireless PowerShare." Their been rumors Apple will add it too.

I've always wondered if my pitch on that TV show to Mark Burnett(creator of the voice, survivor, shark tank, etc) & Intel was the spark for it all or they'd been working on it prior. I would hope Intel created some patents around it as overall it was just idea I pitched on recorded video for the show to Mark and folks at Intel.

I'm not a mechanical or battery engineer rather a web developer. Would be cool to see if my idea (was at a tech event & phone died yet was surrounded by tons of powered up devices) was the first that sparked reverse wireless charging.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#103

Post by andylynch »

cbm-vic-20 wrote: post #62
Kye wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

This recent report from Ukraine is quite impressive: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/ukraine-awards-mi...

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#104

Post by roperj »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #17
rob74 wrote: post #10

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…

That reminds me, I don't remember if it was USB 1 or 2, but at some point I added a card to my PC that added two USB ports. I think that must've been USB 2.0 because the sockets were blue and I'm fairly sure I could hook up my keyboard and mouse through USB already.

Blue is officially USB 3.0 - or possibly some knock off junk of course is always a possibility.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#105

Post by TeMPOraL »

derbOac wrote: post #95
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,…

I still use them regularly, and will buy one if one breaks or something like that. I use cloud storage most of the time but frankly I don't trust it completely for privacy as well as access reasons, and my storage needs would be pretty huge, so I backup files on a flash drive as a kind of second backup. I also use external SDD drives, but only periodically as they take up much more space and I don't lug them around.…

> I also use external SDD drives, but only periodically as they take up much more space and I don't lug them around. I can fit a flash drive in my coat pocket when I'm traveling, and so forth and so on.

This may be a more recent development, but I was recently buying an external SSD for my in-laws, and current options on the market are ~credit card sized (though thicker) and store a terabyte. It's already small enough I'd worry about misplacing it, but also small enough it would fit in my coat pocket, and there surely are smaller options.

I'm like you wrt. controlling my own physical storage - it's just repeated bad experiences with USB sticks and SD cards that made me reluctant to ever spend money on them ever again. Even with SD cards, I just reuse the few good ones I got some 6 years ago (there's one I use for phones, and a few I got sitting inside Raspberry Pis).

> I suppose I could use my phone; I hadn't thought of that, but I like to leave as much space as possible for stuff on there, and I'd still not want some backup for that.

Same here - if I use my phone in this role, it's strictly temporary, just to transfer data between machines. Space on the phone is precious - in my experience, no matter how much of it you have, it will mysteriously disappear somewhere within a year, leaving you with a phone barely capable of storing recent photos and few apps before it starts choking due to lack of space...

(I say somewhere because I really have no idea where - on my Android phones, the "storage use breakdown" in settings feels like it never adds up.)

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#106

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

ekianjo wrote: post #51
wkjagt wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

single density floppies were 720k

There were basically never any 5.25" or 3.5" single-density disks on the PC, and the definition of double-density varied depending on disk size.

5.25" disks were 40 track, 9 sectors per track with 512 byte sectors for 180KB per side. For 3.5" disks, the definition was 80 track so 360KB per side.

High-density increased the number of sectors per track to 15 for 5.25" (600KB per side) and to 18 for 3.5" (720KB per side).

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#107

Post by namdnay »

myself248 wrote: post #97
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…

98SE still needed driver installation for every stick. It was WinME that included the first mass-storage generic class drivers. These were then backported to 98SE, and pretty much every vintagecomputing enthusiast with a 98 box is running this despite the anachronism, because authenticity is just such a massive PITA. https://vetusware.com/download/Universal%20USB%20Mass%20Stor... In case you're in the market for such…

"Universal" USB stick support came slightly earlier, with 2k. I distinctly remember it being a game-changer

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#108

Post by ufmace »

The strange thing about the thumb drive world - I can remember getting my first one in the early 2000s, capacity of 4MB or so I think. The odd part is I have no clue what brand it was, where I got it from, or how I heard that they existed. I vaguely recall it being some no-name vaguely sketchy seeming thing. But it worked great.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#110

Post by mypetocean »

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.

I still make it a point to disable AutoPlay and AutoRun on every PC I possess.

No, operating system, thou shalt not be permitted to seek and run executable code automatically on every connected storage media. I thankest thou most assuredly.

Post reply on HN