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Who invented the thumb drive?

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Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#141

Post by Arrath »

CrypticShift wrote: post #3

> global sales of thumb drives from all manufacturers surpassed $7 billion, a number that is expected to rise to more than $10 billion by 2028. More than 20 years later, they are indeed dirty cheap. However, I often find them to be unreliable with slow/unsteady real speeds. Meanwhile, small NVMe-based devices in either this thumb-format or SD-format (5 years in the making [1]) are still not very popular, so the price…

My office has a stash of staples thumb drives for people to use to schlep stuff around. They have the absolute worst, dog-slow controllers I've ever encountered. Or it could be an interaction with Sophos. Anyway, putting even a single file onto the drive takes a solid 45 seconds.

Scanning something and saving it directly to USB at the MFC takes multiple minutes if its anything more than a few pages.

The quality of these things has really gone down as they've gotten commoditized, it seems.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#142

Post by josephcsible »

Arrath wrote: post #141
CrypticShift wrote: post #3

> global sales of thumb drives from all manufacturers surpassed $7 billion, a number that is expected to rise to more than $10 billion by 2028. More than 20 years later, they are indeed dirty cheap. However, I often find them to be unreliable with slow/unsteady real speeds. Meanwhile, small NVMe-based devices in either this thumb-format or SD-format (5 years in the making [1]) are still not very popular, so the price…

My office has a stash of staples thumb drives for people to use to schlep stuff around. They have the absolute worst, dog-slow controllers I've ever encountered. Or it could be an interaction with Sophos. Anyway, putting even a single file onto the drive takes a solid 45 seconds. Scanning something and saving it directly to USB at the MFC takes multiple minutes if its anything more than a few pages. The quality of th…

I'd give it about a 1% chance that it's actually bad flash drives, and a 99% chance it's Sophos.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#143

Post by Arrath »

josephcsible wrote: post #142
Arrath wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My office has a stash of staples thumb drives for people to use to schlep stuff around. They have the absolute worst, dog-slow controllers I've ever encountered. Or it could be an interaction with Sophos. Anyway, putting even a single file onto the drive takes a solid 45 seconds. Scanning something and saving it directly to USB at the MFC takes multiple minutes if its anything more than a few pages. The quality of th…

I'd give it about a 1% chance that it's actually bad flash drives, and a 99% chance it's Sophos.

Fair. It also loves to do full system scans at the worst time and send my fans to full throttle.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#144

Post by jaclaz »

function_seven wrote: post #133
jaclaz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

You skipped the time where there were punchers to open a second hole in 3.5 DD to make them HD (those were the times .... ;)):

https://www.webcommand.net/index.php/2019/07/31/does-anyone-...

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#145

Post by unixhero »

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…

Great site. Thanks for providing it

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#146

Post by ridgered4 »

antiterra wrote: post #138
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 l…

I've only ever seen a IBM PC/2 with a 2.88MB drive, never actually saw a disk though.

I remember seeing something about floppies and how the technology just sort of stopped advancing for awhile even though there was a need for improved capacity. It talked about how there was actually a lot of low hanging fruit that just was never picked, like how the obvious idea of storing more bits on the outer edges of the disk (where the circumference was larger) never was implemented.

I remember using spanned zips to ferry MP3s around on multiple floppies in the mid 90s. CD burners weren't super common and wasting a single disk for transferring 10s of megabytes seemed silly. For awhile there zip disks felt like they were going to replace them and did have a heyday until flash drives showed up. Both were tech that felt super late in arrival for how badly needed they were at the time.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#147

Post by Fwirt »

hakfoo wrote: post #121
TeMPOraL wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one application that never made sense to me. It's like an idea to use SD cards with paper printers - you'd want to connect directly with a cable, or hook it up to LAN/WLAN, on the first available opportunity. I get that 10 years ago, back when I was in this space, this was a consequence of DIY builds being Arduino-based - SD cards were the easiest form of durable storage to work with, and the alternative was s…

I think people don't want the printer in the same room as their computer. If it's noisy or you have the smell of melting filament, that's not a pleasant experience. Network-attached might work, but that probably complicates the device UI substantially-- some way to bind it to a WLAN, possibly even set up non-DHCP network configuration.

There's an existing package - OctoPrint - that you install on a Raspberry Pi and connect up to your 3D printer that can provide a web interface for just about any 3D printer on the market, so you don't have to shuffle files around on SD cards or stream G-code from your local machine. They provide a disk image that you can flash so it's more or less plug-and-play. Still need an SD card for the Raspberry Pi though. :)

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#148

Post by ohbtvz »

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.

> 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.

They don't accept emails? All the ones I've been to, do.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#149

Post by ridgered4 »

asvitkine wrote: post #18
Neil44 wrote: post #4

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. 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…

To be fair, floppies were pretty easy, just had no capacity.

I remember loading some of my old floppies about 10 years ago, maybe as a bit of a nostalgia trip. I believe I'd kept my floppy drive around that long but probably hadn't actually used it in 10 years. Although I was a pretty heavy user in the mid 90s I was kind of kind of shocked how brutally slow and loud the copying operation was, and I didn't have memories of either of those aspects being great!

There is something satisfying about the mechanical chunk when they the disk snaps in though.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#150

Post by zoklet-enjoyer »

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.

I have fond memories of Windows ME. My family upgraded from 95 to ME, skipped 98
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