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Who invented the thumb drive?

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Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#171

Post by unilynx »

cptskippy wrote: post #164
unilynx wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Can't remember the brand, but it certainly wasn't buffered. And probably (relatively) cheap.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#172

Post by MarioMan »

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 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.

You can validate flash media with f3[1] on Linux/Mac or H2testw on Windows. These tools will fill up the drive with data, then verify that it all reads back properly. This ensures the drive meets the rated capacity and doubles as a sequential read/write test.

1: https://github.com/AltraMayor/f3

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#173

Post by layer8 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #14
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."

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.

A widespread use case is firmware upgrades for various hardware.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#174

Post by kjs3 »

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…

As I recall...

1) Tape drives, at least the common 1/4" cartridge types from folks like Wangtek and Adaptec, came with QIC-36 or QIC-02 PC interfaces before SCSI. Lots of those were sold. It was nice when the SCSI ones became common, since you didn't have to have a separate controller board for your tape. The cartridges were cheap (relatively), but the drive/controller certainly wasn't. Reliable, tho.

2) If you had the right software, tapes could have a TOC written at the beginning. Not random access, but it allowed you to 'fast forward' to the files you were interested in. Saved tons of time, but definitely not as good as a ZIP.

3) Many of the 'micro tape' drives from folks like Irwin (DC1000?) were as often as not attached to the floppy controller. Still better than swapping floppies. And I had a ton of external ones that were parallel port attached. I didn't see a lot of SCSI ones, but they surely existed. Not so reliable in my experience.

4) Tangentially, there were at least 2 vendors that attached 9-track tape drives (the big reel to reel ones) to PCs, and at least 1 that attached a VCR as a tape drive. Neither took off.

5) For a long time back then (6 years sounds about right) virtually everyone I knew in creative fields (advertising, music, visual art, etc) had a ZIP drive. To the extent that if I saw someone with some ZIP drive a reasonable ice-breaker was "so are you an artist?". Unbeatable combination of capacity, speed & cost relative to disk drives, as long as you had good backups.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#175

Post by antod »

vkoskiv wrote: post #16

I am the proud owner of an 8MB IBM branded DiskOnKey flash drive. Plugging it into my linux system, it throws a lot of errors, but I do have a ext2 filesystem on it. I can mount it and find the little 'hello world' text file I put in there last June :)

I had a couple of those IBM 8MB drives - they were a lot larger (physical size) than anything since. I didn't even know USB storage was a thing until they included them in the box with some Thinkpads. Compared to floppies they were amazing in terms of speed, capacity and convenience.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#176

Post by eric__cartman »

shagie wrote: post #44

I've got an early generation portable USB drive that I've kept for some nostalgia. https://imgur.com/2XcXCPe - its 128 MB. I purchased in '96 (or maybe '97). You'll note that it is orange which indicated solid state. There was also a black one which had a spinning disk in that same form factor and held 256 MB. I used it a few times in between 2010 and 2015 for transferring a file around sneaker net. You'll note that…

That thing must have been expensive back when it was new. The flash drive I carry in my keychain nowadays was like $8 new lol

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#177

Post by narag »

ohbtvz wrote: post #148
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.

> 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.

The annoyance for me is owning a printer, not using the usb stick.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#178

Post by themadturk »

dotancohen wrote: post #166
themadturk wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't; I drink my coffee from a Camelbak.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#179

Post by xattt »

ghaff wrote: post #163
xattt wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fresh installs were the norm in my household. We never bothered with in-place upgrades between major versions of 95/98/98SE avoid cruft.

Windows 2000 was absolutely the OS to have until MS tightened XP with SP2.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#180

Post by shagie »

eric__cartman wrote: post #176
shagie wrote: post #44

I've got an early generation portable USB drive that I've kept for some nostalgia. https://imgur.com/2XcXCPe - its 128 MB. I purchased in '96 (or maybe '97). You'll note that it is orange which indicated solid state. There was also a black one which had a spinning disk in that same form factor and held 256 MB. I used it a few times in between 2010 and 2015 for transferring a file around sneaker net. You'll note that…

That thing must have been expensive back when it was new. The flash drive I carry in my keychain nowadays was like $8 new lol

I want to say it was in the $100 to $200 range ($200 to $400 inflation adjusted)... though there may have also been an academic discount on that.
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