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

131–140 of 190 posts

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#131

Post by unsui »

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…

This is definitely one of those little trivia factoids that is surprising to me:

Apparently, WinME actually introduced at least one evolutionary improvement that stuck around, and wasn't a complete dead-end.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#132

Post by Breza »

ghaff wrote: post #125
cedilla wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, did usb sticks come with floppy disks or CDs with a driver?

I think it may have been a mix. There was also a mini CD thing around that time that sometimes got used for drivers. In general, things were switching over to CDs in the late 90s but as I recall floppies were still around for some purposes. ADDED: And as someone else mentioned, you sometimes downloaded drivers. Not everyone had broadband but Internet access was pretty common by then.

I'd forgotten about those mini-CDs. Part of the unboxing process was making sure you didn't scratch the driver disk.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#133

Post by function_seven »

jaclaz wrote: post #53
Ekaros wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually 5.25" were usually 360 KB, the 1.2MB came later, just like 3.5" floppies, they were originally 360 Kb, then 720KB, only later they became 1.44MB: 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 initi…

For all the complaining I do about USB's naming standards—"Full Speed" is not in fact "full", it's slower than "High Speed"—I don't remember having the same gripes about Double Density vs. High Density :)

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#134

Post by goosedragons »

unsui wrote: post #131
myself248 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is definitely one of those little trivia factoids that is surprising to me: Apparently, WinME actually introduced at least one evolutionary improvement that stuck around, and wasn't a complete dead-end.

It had others like System Restore.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#135

Post by asveikau »

unsui wrote: post #131
myself248 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is definitely one of those little trivia factoids that is surprising to me: Apparently, WinME actually introduced at least one evolutionary improvement that stuck around, and wasn't a complete dead-end.

Even the worst versions of windows has engineers working on low level iterative improvements, far detached from the product level people who are fucking up the big picture.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#136

Post by function_seven »

cm2187 wrote: post #68
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!

I can't stop myself from doing this all the time with music. I'll constantly realize things like, "Smells Like Teen Spirit is older today than Sgt. Pepper was when Nevermind was released."

My memories of growing up were of my parents listening to the oldies station, and how that music was ancient! And here I am with an understanding that—to them, listening at that time—the music was just "a few years ago".

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#137

Post by dghughes »

The earliest I recall seeing a USB thumb drive was early 2000s maybe 2003. Staples then or a year later had 45MB thumb drives on sale I think $50). People went nuts over this deal. The cashier asked the elderly woman buying one if she wanted the protection plan for it. I probably still have the one I bought.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#138

Post by antiterra »

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."

Except they (rarely) held up to 2.88MB.

I think an article about removable storage would have been written similarly two decades ago. People do forget things or didn’t take note of them at the time.

For example, I remember a lot of things about the Commodore 64, but I don’t remember the capacity in bytes or blocks of its floppies. Also, I sort of remember that Amiga floppies were 880k after formatting, but I had to look it up just now to confirm.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#139

Post by theandrewbailey »

jasode wrote: post #20
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…

>But theoretically the tech was around and could have been implemented as early as 1996. The USB physical form-factor and electrical signals were 1996 but the protocol for storage devices appears to be later in 1998: Universal Serial Bus Mass Storage Class Specification Overview V1.0 Revision October 22, 1998 : https://cscott.net/usb_dev/data/devclass/usbmassover_10.pdf

> Universal Serial Bus Mass Storage Class Specification

Back in the day, some of my friends called thumbdrives MSDs, because when you plugged one in, Windows would show a popup telling you that it found a new USB Mass Storage Device. I don't recall that initialism catching on with anybody.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#140

Post by anthk »

ivanmontillam wrote: post #70
jabbany wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Android Phones do that today over Mass Storage...
Post reply on HN