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Who invented the thumb drive?

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Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#161

Post by unilynx »

slt2021 wrote: post #157
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.

> Burning disks was a ceremony where you carefully shutdown anything running and defragged your HDD to ensure nothing would interrupt the burning process.

"You think that's bad?" We had to literally watch the burn process. Walk away and it would fail.

Took a while to realise it was the vibrations of the wooden floor that would kill the burn process if you didn't sneak away very carefully..

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#162

Post by bombolo »

giaour wrote: post #58
bombolo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Uh? I had to install drivers to make them work. So I could not just bring one with me and assume I'd be able to read it wherever I went.

When was this? I recall carrying a USB stick with a bootable image in the early 2000s because it was reasonable to assume BIOS support for reading from USB. I also remember carrying a separate stick with "portable apps" that I could plug in and run on any Windows computer I happened to find myself using.

Late windows 95/early windows 98 was my first computer with a single usb port and no drivers for usb memories.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#163

Post by ghaff »

xattt wrote: post #155
unsui wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Long time ago but I think, as a normal Windows 95 or Windows 98-using consumer, upgrading to Windows ME was almost certainly easier and less disruptive. In spite of the criticism it got at the time, Windows ME worked fine for most people.

I had some involvement with Windows 2000 from a professional product perspective--was even at the launch event--but don't think I ever seriously ran it as a desktop OS.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#164

Post by cptskippy »

unilynx wrote: post #161
slt2021 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Burning disks was a ceremony where you carefully shutdown anything running and defragged your HDD to ensure nothing would interrupt the burning process. "You think that's bad?" We had to literally watch the burn process. Walk away and it would fail. Took a while to realise it was the vibrations of the wooden floor that would kill the burn process if you didn't sneak away very carefully..

> Walk away and it would fail.

I haven't heard that one. Did you have one of those HP CD Writers with purple button and no buffer too?

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#165

Post by derekp7 »

xattt wrote: post #155
unsui wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Windows ME still had the same loading sequence as Windows 95/98. That is, DOS kernel booted and then loaded the Windows code. Now it is true that Windows 95 and above mostly bypassed DOS once it was loaded, and DOS was used as merely a boot loader. And Windows ME made that more hidden. But you could still extract a DOS version out of ME (open a command window, use "format /s", then copy the various DOS command executables from the one directory to the floppy). You could then use this to boot DOS, and type "win" or something like that to load Windows ME.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#166

Post by dotancohen »

themadturk wrote: post #154
Breza wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where do you put the coffee mug down?

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#168

Post by dotancohen »

Mistletoe wrote: post #115
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.

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.

I agree with you 100%. That's why I bought a 10" Boox Eink tablet last week - to read real print without maintaining a printer. The PDF reader the thing comes from supports PDF annotations, and it comes with a Wacom pen, so I can continue to highlight and scribble.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#169

Post by marcosdumay »

tracker1 wrote: post #88
marcosdumay wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like floppies at the late 00's. You never need them, except for those 5 or 6 fringe use cases that nobody else has (everybody has some 5 or 6 of them). If our computers were actually able to connect with each other, we would be using phones for everything already. But they can't, and phones are so user hostile that it's not obvious that you can even read your data in any way.

By the late 00's you were as likely to have a Zip drive for smaller (100mb) exchanges... if it weren't for the excessive licensing fees for the disks, the fate of the devices might have been a lot different. I really didn't consider thumb drives worth my time until they started getting over 256mb or so, I think it was also after USB3 was a thing, but it's a bit muddied in my memory.

Oh, man. Any place you may want to bring that zip disk was already clicking, and you were just lucky that you listened it destroy somebody's else disk before you put yours on.

The way to share data was CD-ROM. Everybody had one or two rewritable disks with random stuff on them. But you could use neither the zips nor the CDs for some stuff.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#170

Post by kjs3 »

xattt wrote: post #155
unsui wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While I agree Win2k was in all ways better, it wasn't cheap relative to ME.
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