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Who invented the thumb drive?

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Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#181

Post by aidenn0 »

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've never gotten a counterfeit thumb drive off of the rack at Best Buy. I don't buy them online because of the possibility of getting counterfeits.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#182

Post by aidenn0 »

Doorstep2077 wrote: post #159

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 sec…

> with data transfer speeds of only a few megabytes per second

That sounds high to me; some of my more recent USB drives get single-digit MB/s. USB 1.1 had a theoretical limit of 1.2MB/s and I doubt many (any?) early thumb drives achieved that.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#183

Post by aidenn0 »

Ekaros wrote: post #30
richardhod wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also a good guess because if I remember correctly the floppy floppy disks which were flatter with a larger surface area and actually floppy were about 512k or so. I only ever saw one machine with one of those in though and of course it was at school, running useless software for us

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.

I seem to recall that there was a dedicated word-processor machine by someone from the original Macintosh team that formatted 3.5" disks for 512K.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#184

Post by aidenn0 »

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…

The LS-240 could format them to hold up to 32MB.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#185

Post by aidenn0 »

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…

By the time thumb-drives "just worked" so did USB versions of LS-120. Lugging the entire LS-120 drive around defeated the purpose though.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#186

Post by cptskippy »

kjs3 wrote: post #174
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 t…

> tapes could have a TOC written at the beginning.

I remember that being a big deal but I don't think I encountered that until about 1999 when I was working help desk for a small IT shop. I don't really have a good frame of reference, I picked up my Irwin Tape Backup ~1995 from a computer salvage store and I downloaded the software from a Bulletin Board.

> 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.

That was my experience too. I worked at Office Max for a time and most clients who brought work into the Copy Max copy center would do so on either Zip or Jazz. I remember them having a PC solely for PC formatted Zip Disks to transfer to a Mac.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#187

Post by aidenn0 »

jarenmf wrote: post #32
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…

They were really a big deal. For the first time there was convenient way for people to share music, books, or videos. I remember everyone in college had their USB drive on them all the time and would just casually exchange media before everyone had access to high speed Internet.

Comments like this remind me of how spoiled I was by my college network. It was before any non-geeks (and many geeks) had USB drives, but we had super fast internet access and even faster intranet; DirectConnect and various IM solutions were how people exchanged media.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#189

Post by jaclaz »

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.

Zip disks were earlier, in the 1995-2005 decade, by the end of 2000's they were already going towards obsolescence.

After the 100 MB, there was the 250 MB and later even came the 750 MB.

In my experience they were very handy/useful, particularly for backup use, but they were seriously troubled by the click of death issue.

USB 3 came well after 2/4/8 GB USB (2.0) sticks were common enough, USB 3.0 started becoming a common thing around 2010 or later, around 2004/2005 a common USB stick would have been 256 or 512 MB, in a couple years they quickly grew to 1/2/4/8 GB minimum.

Re: Who invented the thumb drive?

#190

Post by knicholes »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #96
knicholes wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3D Printers

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 want to use an SD card for my printer in case Windows decides to self-update, despite me setting it to not do this automatically, and I don't want to fail in the middle of my print. Hosting the GCODE can also cause issues if your computer lags a bit. The printer will sit, with a hot nozzle dripping plastic below, until the next command arrives. This shouldn't typically be a problem, but sometimes systems can lag hard, and who wants a needless blob of filament on the surface of their print?
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