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

151–160 of 190 posts

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#151

Post by ridgered4 »

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 started buying m.2 drives instead because they've gotten super cheap and are almost the same size. The main reason is even the crappiest m.2 drive has acceptable write performance but many USB drives are unbearable. I bought a little m.2 dock, I wish the enclosures weren't all expensive.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#153

Post by rocqua »

delecti wrote: post #35
asvitkine wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They were also vastly more error prone. Maybe my experience isn't representative, but floppy drives were always janky, and floppy discs failed all the time, while I can't remember a USB drive ever dying. I lost lots of files on floppies.

So many floppies were damaged by magnets that almost all people still remember "magnets and floppies do not mix". That was a hard-learned lesson for many people.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#154

Post by themadturk »

Breza wrote: post #132
ghaff wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I got a mini-CD the other day with drivers for a new USB-C Ethernet dongle. I almost laughed out loud. I have a couple of external CD/DVD/BluRay drives around. But it's been a long time since I had an internal CD drive.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#155

Post by xattt »

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.

If you were going to install Windows ME, you might as well have installed Windows 2000.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#156

Post by salawat »

PinguTS wrote: post #78
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.

It is still today the fastest way to move large amount of data around. If both parties have 1 Gbps connection it will take about 20 min to move about 128 GB. But if one end has only 100 Mbps, then it is already 3,5h. If can only maintain reliably 25 Mbps, then it is already shy over 14h. So you can almost mail a thumb drive faster.

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of (tapes/thumb drives/sdcards) hurtling down the highway.

Sometimes, it's just easier to SneakerNet that chongus mass of "the most important data ever".

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#157

Post by slt2021 »

cptskippy wrote: post #122

> The Iomega Zip Drive, called a “superfloppy” drive and introduced in 1994, could store up to 750 MB of data and was writable, but it never gained widespread popularity, partly due to competition from cheaper and higher-capacity hard drives. I've heard or read a few stories about the Zip Drive recently and they all seem to compress the 10ish years of existence and completely downplay it's impact or significance. In…

right around that time I remember, I was carrying 2GB HDD as a removable thumb drive - to exchange music/apps with friends.

Exciting times, when I prepared a careful and curated directory of music and apps to share with my friends and connecting drive via HDD could be possible even online, while PC was running.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#158

Post by Raed667 »

narag wrote: post #113
Raed667 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

if that is important for you (which it should be) then don't use other people printers for these kind of documents.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#159

Post by Doorstep2077 »

One interesting fact about thumb drives is that they have evolved significantly since they were first introduced. The first thumb drives were created in the late 1990s and were much larger and less reliable than the ones we use today. They were also much slower, with data transfer speeds of only a few megabytes per second. In comparison, modern thumb drives can transfer data at speeds of hundreds of megabytes per second and are small enough to fit on a keychain. This has made them an essential tool for many people, and they are now commonly used to store and transfer data for personal and professional use.
Post reply on HN