unsung? not anymore. this article is singing for him
Who invented the thumb drive?
111–120 of 190 posts
Re: Who invented the thumb drive?
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
last time I had to print passport they were asking me to send email. This is such a ridiculous thing to be honest from the privacy point of view.
Pretty sure if they want to keep a copy of your passport then they can make one when you give them a USB as well.
Re: Who invented the thumb drive?
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
last time I had to print passport they were asking me to send email. This is such a ridiculous thing to be honest from the privacy point of view.
Pretty sure if they want to keep a copy of your passport then they can make one when you give them a USB as well.
But even if they don't want, it's still there for GMail, other employees, whoever hacks their account, etc.
Re: Who invented the thumb drive?
#114Earlier 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.
Get a black and white Brother laser printer. It's super affordable, costs almost no money or time to maintain, and always works.
Still two orders of magnitude more expensive for my needs. Thank you but nope.
Re: Who invented the thumb drive?
#115Earlier 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.
I love my laser printer. There’s something about looking at data on paper that I really enjoy. Store it in a binder to look at later. Hang it on the wall to think about. I look at screens enough already. I don’t mindlessly print stuff off but important stuff like soil tests etc. I’d rather have a physical copy than go search for it electronically.
Re: Who invented the thumb drive?
#116Earlier 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
Except on a Mac, then they were 800k.
Re: Who invented the thumb drive?
#117There are thumb drives, and then there are index finger drives
https://bergie.iki.fi/blog/when_reality_meets_product_concep...
Re: Who invented the thumb drive?
#118Someone not smart enough to understand that most people want to write on it with a pen, so it should contain a large flat, bright-colored surface.
I guess manufacturers assumed people will first and foremost use them to move data around, not to backup/archive it, which makes sense as they were somewhat pricey initially, while the role of "write once, read many" was occupied by CD-R discs. Of course, at some point the prices dropped, and eventually some people ended up owning a dozen USB sticks of various sizes and shapes, some of which used for archiving, but n…
To be fair, there were some USB sticks (that did not have much success) by PNY that had a (clever) open/close mechanism that made it into a rectangular shape with a paper label on one side where you could write (only 2 lines).
The case/mechanism was similar to this:
https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-6bkt1ygjlf/images/stencil/60...
but they were sold in boxes of 10 or 12, I cannot remember if they were 1 or 2 GB capacity.
EDIT:
found an actual picture of them:
http://www.usbmemorysticks.net/wp-content/gallery/pny-third-...
they were 2 and 4 GB.
Re: Who invented the thumb drive?
#119It 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…
So, did usb sticks come with floppy disks or CDs with a driver?
Re: Who invented the thumb drive?
#120I remember buying my first thumb drive. I think it was in 2000 or so, and it cost $75 from Staples. It had a whopping 128mb of storage, which at the time felt massive. I used it for years until eventually it was lost.