Who Really Invented the Thumb Drive? (ieee.org) 134
IEEE Spectrum: In 2000, at a trade fair in Germany, an obscure Singapore company called Trek 2000 unveiled a solid-state memory chip encased in plastic and attached to a Universal Serial Bus (USB) connector. The gadget, roughly the size of a pack of chewing gum, held 8 megabytes of data and required no external power source, drawing power directly from a computer when connected. It was called the ThumbDrive. That device, now known by a variety of names -- including memory stick, USB stick, flash drive, as well as thumb drive -- changed the way computer files are stored and transferred. Today it is familiar worldwide. The thumb drive was an instant hit, garnering hundreds of orders for samples within hours. Later that year, Trek went public on the Singapore stock exchange, and in four months -- from April through July 2000 -- it manufactured and sold more than 100,000 ThumbDrives under its own label.
Before the invention of the thumb drive, computer users stored and transported their files using floppy disks. Developed by IBM in the 1960s, first 8-inch and later 5 1/4-inch and 3 1/2-inch floppy disks replaced cassette tapes as the most practical portable storage media. Floppy disks were limited by their relatively small storage capacity -- even double-sided, double-density disks could store only 1.44 MB of data. During the 1990s, as the size of files and software increased, computer companies searched for alternatives. Personal computers in the late 1980s began incorporating CD-ROM drives, but initially these could read only from prerecorded disks and could not store user-generated data. 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.
Computer users badly needed a cheap, high-capacity, reliable, portable storage device. The thumb drive was all that -- and more. It was small enough to slip in a front pocket or hang from a keychain, and durable enough to be rattled around in a drawer or tote without damage. With all these advantages, it effectively ended the era of the floppy disk. But Trek 2000 hardly became a household name. And the inventor of the thumb drive and Trek's CEO, Henn Tan, did not become as famous as other hardware pioneers like Robert Noyce, Douglas Engelbart, or Steve Jobs. Even in his home of Singapore, few people know of Tan or Trek. Why aren't they more famous? After all, mainstream companies including IBM, TEAC, Toshiba, and, ultimately, Verbatim licensed Trek's technology for their own memory stick devices. And a host of other companies just copied Tan without permission or acknowledgment.
Before the invention of the thumb drive, computer users stored and transported their files using floppy disks. Developed by IBM in the 1960s, first 8-inch and later 5 1/4-inch and 3 1/2-inch floppy disks replaced cassette tapes as the most practical portable storage media. Floppy disks were limited by their relatively small storage capacity -- even double-sided, double-density disks could store only 1.44 MB of data. During the 1990s, as the size of files and software increased, computer companies searched for alternatives. Personal computers in the late 1980s began incorporating CD-ROM drives, but initially these could read only from prerecorded disks and could not store user-generated data. 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.
Computer users badly needed a cheap, high-capacity, reliable, portable storage device. The thumb drive was all that -- and more. It was small enough to slip in a front pocket or hang from a keychain, and durable enough to be rattled around in a drawer or tote without damage. With all these advantages, it effectively ended the era of the floppy disk. But Trek 2000 hardly became a household name. And the inventor of the thumb drive and Trek's CEO, Henn Tan, did not become as famous as other hardware pioneers like Robert Noyce, Douglas Engelbart, or Steve Jobs. Even in his home of Singapore, few people know of Tan or Trek. Why aren't they more famous? After all, mainstream companies including IBM, TEAC, Toshiba, and, ultimately, Verbatim licensed Trek's technology for their own memory stick devices. And a host of other companies just copied Tan without permission or acknowledgment.
It's one of those "obvious" inventions. (Score:3, Insightful)
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There were plenty of portable flash memory products before the thumb drive came along. Memory cards based on the PCMCIA (later PC Card) format hit the market in the early '90s. The CompactFlash interface, which is a subset of the PC Card interface, came a few years later.
What made the thumb drive unique was that it was a dongle that didn't require a slot like PC Cards or various compact memory cards (CF, MMC, SD, xD, etc...) needed. It just inserted itself like a tick into any USB port and stayed put, no
Re: It's one of those "obvious" inventions. (Score:2)
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Arguably the first to implement that kind of thing were games consoles. Before flash memory got cheap you had either battery backed RAM or passwords.
Battery backed was a real pain. Then we got flash memory memory cards, initially with only a few kilobytes of storage.
Thumb drives were just a case of waiting for the price of a useful amount of flash memory to come down. You could already get USB readers for game memory cards.
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But what R/W non volatile memory that was also affordable was there before flash? Battery backed SRAM was the only option, or disk if you could afford it and all the support hardware/software.
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If they didn't "invent" it, some one else would have.
I think this line has been said about literally every invention in history.
BS (Score:5, Informative)
"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."
This is BS.
The Zip Drive was quite popular. It debuted at 100MB. It had iterations for additional capacity over the years. It was popular enough to have four varieties, the original external parallel and SCSI models, and internal SCSI and IDE models. It might have had an external USB model as well, but I wasn't using them anymore by that point if they did.
Regardless, it was a combination of USB flash memory becoming increasingly cost-competitive along with mechanical issues ("click of death") combined with more permanent storage on cheap, writable inorganic optical media killing it off. The highest-capacity models came out too-little, too-late. If someone needed a small file it was cheap enough to hand them a USB flash drive or burned CD (later DVD) compared to a fairly expensive Zip disk that it wasn't worth using the Iomega format anymore.
Re:BS (Score:4, Insightful)
proprietary formats always sucked and will always suck.
That's why Iomega Zip failed.
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The article is right that the drive, while popular, was never mainstream. My first zip drive was obtained after I bought a second hand computer that had one built in.
They were ultra common for people who needed to transfer large files, e.g. for DTP. Some PCs actually came with them preinstalled. Pretty much all the computer nerds I knew had a Zip 100 drive. We used them extensively for file swapping because internet speeds were still poor then, most people were still on a modem and ISDN was the hot shit.
Re: BS (Score:2)
What's wrong with CDs? That's how I remember the vast majority of large file transfers taking place.
Zip was pretty niche. CDs were so ridiculously cheap compared to Zip disks that it didn't really matter even if the CDs were write-once. And the fact that CDs were ALSO very cheap when rewritable means the use cases demanding something like Zip disk were vanishingly small.
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At least in my memory, the ubiquity of writable CDs came later. In the mid-late 90s, Zip/Jaz drives were the best and easiest way to transfer large amounts of data. Then in the early-mid 2000s, CD-Rs, CD-RWs, and associated drives became cheap and widespread enough for those to supersede the Iomega technology.
Re: BS (Score:2)
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They were ultra common for people who needed to transfer large files, e.g. for DTP. Some PCs actually came with them preinstalled.
The problem was that they were not common enough. I'd be surprised if they ever had over 15-20% of the PC market.
So even if you had a Zip drive and had to transfer large files, chances are you couldn't read your Zip disk on your friend's PC.
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I've never seen a zip drive in the wild. In magazines or ads, sure, so I knew what it was, but not once I saw someone actually use one. Most everyone seemed to go floppies->CDR->Flash drives.
Were they actually popular in the US? Cause I don't think they ever took off in Europe at all.
Re: BS (Score:2)
Jaz drive was great on paper Re: BS (Score:2)
That said I remember selling exactly zero Jaz drives, and zero Jaz cartridges. I don't know where they ended up when the company went un
Re: Jaz drive was great on paper Re: BS (Score:2)
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I can see a box of 10 of them on my shelf right now, next to an unopened box of 3.5 inch floppies. I started with the parallel-port version, which was very popular in the same era as Traveling Software's LapLink software. The parallel port was the high-speed interface just before USB became ubiquitous.
Then the USB version came out, then the Zip250. We used them at the office to store files larger than 1.44 MB that were updated often, especially AutoCAD drawings. They were also great for transporting fil
Zip for designers Re:BS (Score:2)
Were they actually popular in the US? Cause I don't think they ever took off in Europe at all.
One group that embraced Zip in the US was the design - particularly graphic design - community. My wife had one attached to her PowerMac when we met, as when she bought it she could buy the Zip drive (external SCSI of course for that generation Mac) with a couple discs for less than what CD-R drives were going for at the time. Eventually the CD-R eclipsed it but it took a while.
Re:BS (Score:5, Insightful)
Many standards started proprietary and then got copied, or at least widely and easily licensed. The PC is an oddball in terms of architecture, and what would catch on or not was hit or miss, but once one maker started copying an innovation then everyone would start doing this in short order. The thumbdrive, as the article notes, was widely copied and often without even bothering to get it licensed.
Zip Drives came before the thumb drive, and early thumb drives when they did come out had much smaller capacity and were more expensive. It took some time before you got a thumb drive with decent capacity and price. I still have a small thumb drive that I asked for as a Christmas present, because it was still just a bit pricey. I think Zip was before writeable DVD was common, and the writeable CD had its own inconveniences for being slow, loud, with specialized third party software to use.
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The gap between thumb drives being released and being cost-size-quality competitive with Zip disks was only about 3 years.
I bought my first thumb drive, a 256 MB unit, in spring 2004 after my buddy introduced me. It cost me about the same as four 100 MB Iomega Zip Disks, IIRC.
The 100 MB Zip Disk was the most prolific size, as that was the initially released drive capacity; if you were carting Zip Disks around between different places, you couldn't be sure the drives elsewhere were the 250 MB version. My Uni
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The big advantage with flash drives was that every PC had USB ports. Zip drives were far from universal.
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Today's thumb drives' qualites suck. I still have 128 MB drives that still work! Also, they have lights to show their real-time status.
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> Today's thumb drives' qualites suck
Most do. Variability is terrible even within brands.
The only ones I own that I am impressed with are this Sandisk [amzn.to] device and this Samsung [amzn.to] device.
And I have had turkeys from both brands (I'm looking at you EVO 860 with the NCQ stinkeye).
If you're looking for something else get a "Free Returns" model and benchmark the snot out of it before relying on it.
The faster drives also seem to be reliable - unless they overheat and go offline. I've had that happen too. Fill t
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Nice. How long have you been using them and how much usages so far? I like that dual USB connectors!
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The Zip drive really didn't fail. It was obsoleted. At the time, having a SCSI or parallel port ZIP drive was quite nice, because other than the click of death, it worked well, had "good enough" password protection to keep data out of prying eyes, was decently rugged, and was a definite size upgrade from floppy drives.
There were a few part of the Zip drive format that it would have been nice if opened. How password protection was done on disks, for example. At the time, it did an okay job, and was as go
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I think it was mostly because CD-R got popular. It was good for having a lot of "large" (for the day) files, but it lost out for backup or for just giving someone a bunch of files. That and the "click of death", though I hear that might have been mostly with the larger sizes (250 and 750).
Back in the day I never went past the 100 size, and mostly used them for backups of boxes of floppies. Now I have a whole bunch of disks, mostly bought by the load from thrift stores, and a couple of 100 and 250 USB drive
Re:BS (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, this.
Zip drives were floppy replacements, not hard drive competitors, and they preceded thumb drives. They were not USB, they were IDE and SCSI and they were popular enough that PC BIOSes were modified to support them as floppies. Not only that, but Zip was not the only one, SyQuest offered theirs as well. Iomega was better established but was not better than SyQuest, IMO. Zip/SyQuest did not really fail, they were rendered uninteresting by internet connectivity and thumb drives (and writable optical on the large capacity end).
Why not claim that CD-ROM/DVD were also failures "due to competition from cheaper and higher-capacity hard drives", it would be just as accurate.
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Zip drives were floppy replacements, not hard drive competitors, and they preceded thumb drives. They were not USB
That was only true initially. The last of the external Zip 100s and the Zip 250s were USB. You can identify a USB Zip 100 at a distance because of the translucent case.
Why not claim that CD-ROM/DVD were also failures "due to competition from cheaper and higher-capacity hard drives", it would be just as accurate.
Nah, we still use CD-ROM for driver disks, and DVD is still used both for software distribution (some software still has physical media options) and for archival (there are long life recordable discs.) But Zip, SyQuest, and so on are literally only still used by antique computing enthusiasts.
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"They were not USB"
Only because USB hadn't been invented yet.
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My dad had a USB zip disk drive like this one probably around the early 2000s:
https://www.amazon.ca/Iomega-3... [amazon.ca]
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You can still buy CD drives and blank media. Because they were a common standard that every computer shipped with for two decades.
Floppy disks and USB were in every computer too. Zip and all the other super floppy formats were never universal. You couldn't be sure any random computer could read your Orb disk or Jazz cartridge.
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and they were popular enough that PC BIOSes were modified to support them as floppies.
BIOSes are (still) full of support for some incredibly esoteric hardware. At the time basically all hardware regardless of its popularity in someway or another required BIOS support.
Re:BS (Score:4, Informative)
Re:BS (Score:4, Informative)
Iomega themselves labeled them "The SuperFloppy." [ecrater.com]
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>The ZIP drive could store about 100MB, not 750
Half a seconds worth of search would have saved you looking like a fool.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
100MB, 250MB, 750MB.
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Aw, cut him some slack. I'm of the era and had an internal Zip at home, a parallel Zip at work and a Jaz at home and I never remember a 750 meg Zip either. If anything, it probably shows the degree to which everybody had moved on by the time 750s came out, but, OK, search has a picture of when they were on Amazon so I guess somebody bought a couple and this wasn't a confusion with the Jaz.
It was bad marketing Re:BS (Score:2)
An LS-120 was closer to a superfloppy than a ZIP drive
The LS-120 was also called the "superdisk", and had the added benefit of being able to read and write regular 3.5" floppies as well. It clearly was the result of a company that did their homework, but were both late to the party and lacked a sense of how to market it effectively. Even as much as they targeted Mac users with the USB LS-120 (after all the first gen iMac had no drive for writeable media when ti was released) they couldn't overcome the time advantage that Zip had, and then they both lost out
Pre-Zip "high-capacity floppies" Re:BS (Score:5, Informative)
Iomega had 5, 10, 20, and possibly other-capacity "floppies" dating back to the early '80s if not earlier.
Other companies had portable high-capacity "floppies" and I if my rusty memory serves, even "hard drive platters" (think small versions of mainframe hard drive platters) as well. Not to mention all sorts of tape mechanisms, magneto-optical storage, and possibly other formats I've long forgotten.
[Iomega] might have had an external USB [Zip drive] as well
They did, in more than one capacity.
Even if fast solid-state-USB-drives hadn't come on the scene, once CD-R was common and the media was cheap, there wasn't a lot of need for slow sub-540MB portable devices with media that costs several times as much per-MB.
Then came DVD-R/RW+/RW-. Even absent the thumb drive, anything sub-4.3GB that was several times the cost-per-GB of a blank DVD would've died a slow death.
So, yeah, the thumb drive killed the Zip drive, but if it hadn't, writable CHEAP optical media would have put a major dent in the demand.
On the other hand, tape is still useful because it's cheap, fast enough for making backups, easy to store offline, and can be easily mounted "read-only" on most systems.
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I found that using CD/DVD for backup to be clumsy myself. It needed third party software because it wasn't built in to the OS yet, and reliability meant you had to double check that the backup really worked and that the session was closed properly. I also found tape to be very expensive in comparison to either, ubiquitous in the office but not widely used at home for that reason.
Re: Pre-Zip "high-capacity floppies" Re:BS (Score:2)
Windows XP had CD writing built in. Microsoft licensed AuthorScript from Sonic Solutions to do that. I donâ(TM)t remember if it did DVD writing too. Windows XP is old enough that itâ(TM)s in that time frame. Apple also added burning to their OS around that time, didnâ(TM)t they?
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MO was a great format. Shame it never took off outside Japan.
The disks were robust and cheap. They were decently fast given the capacity. No physical contact when reading them.
Re:BS (Score:5, Interesting)
I loved the zip drive, there wasn't really anything comparable at the time for a home computer budget. DAT tape drives were much more expensive. Home computer backup was always a bit of a pain and there weren't any real solutions that caught on widely, they all seemed to be in a niche. Writeable CD or DVD were ok but were slow and inconvenient, and I sort of learned to how to re-use the old ones. The Zip Drive acted so much like a floppy that it really felt like the answer; compact, reusable, fast. I think because it was single-sourced that it didn't catch on more widely, though I did see some PC makers supplying it as an option. It was a bit complex though in some ways, because it usually did require an extra adapter card on the computer, especially since external SCSI ports on PCs were rare, which meant that it was mostly used by those willing to go to the extra effort.
Also the CompactFlash wasn't a bad storage media either, predating the thumb drive, although it didn't have the simpler USB connector but instead an ATA interface with all the goofy PIO vs DMA modes so you the performance could vary wildly between different CFs (marketing just labeled as 12x and the like, so it was a chore to find one that was actually DMA for use on an embedded system). Like the ZipDrive though you rarely got an interface for this on a generic PC, so they ended up being more common on digital cameras or small embedded systems.
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I loved the zip drive, there wasn't really anything comparable at the time for a home computer budget.
SyQuest introduced a 135MB 3.5" HDD platter-based storage device called the EZ135 not too long after the debut of the Zip drive. It cost 10-25% more, but it had at least twice the performance and no click of death. They only ever caught on in Macland, because price is king when it comes to PCs but not to macs. I had both and there was absolutely no comparison between them, the EZ135 was like a slow HDD while the Zip was like a fast floppy.
There as also the LS120 SuperDisk [wikipedia.org], this was more literally a fast flo
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They only ever caught on in Macland, because price is king when it comes to PCs but not to macs.
More than the price insensitivity, the fact that Apple owned the creative world at the time was probably a major factor in this. I remember moving Syquest and Bernoulli packs around NYC to production houses when I worked for an artist, and everything was unashamedly 100% Mac.
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Early revs of the Zip drive had some surprisingly intelligent cataloging and backup software. It allowed one to index files, and some file contents, so one could search for a work document, get told it was on zip drive labeled 'foo' with a second copy on 'bar', and then fetch it fairly quickly. Not much out there these days for offline file indexing.
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If ZIP drives had come out exactly when floppies where being phased out for being too small,
They did.
they would have sold like mad.
...and they did.
I mean seriously the vast majority of computer owners I knew had zip drives. I still see them at flea markets and yard sales occasionally, there are that many of them out there. I ditched I think all of mine ages ago, on the premise that it was unlikely that any zip media on the planet had anything I cared about on it, but there's still tons of them out there. In fact just a week or so ago I saw a Zip 100 USB in the wild.
What you have to remember about this period is that the floppy
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I worked in the printing industry in the 1990's and everyone send files out on Zip drives, and later Jazz drives as well.
At one point the price dropped as low as $25 for the 100 MB variety and at any point my desk would have had 50 of them on it. We would send invoices to suppliers and customers if they didn't return our drives, but I don't think anyone paid them, so we just kept their drives and called it even.
Iomega should have been much more successful than they were to be fair.
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Yep, and the only things that killed it off were:
1.) Cheaper, smaller, higher-capacity thumb drives—and, to some extent CD-RW discs.
2.) The click of death: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_of_death#Iomega_Zip_drives [wikipedia.org]
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You are completely correct. The Zip drive absolutely dominated removable storage in its day. The only real competitor at the time was Syquest, they had a similarly sized piece of media which contained a 135MB HDD platter (and later 230MB I think? Hmm, yep [wikipedia.org].) instead of an optically tracked floppy. There indeed were USB Zip drives in both 100 and eventually 250MB capacities, the 100MB units (I had one of these) were translucent blue rather than the almost SGI-like color of the original Zip, but came out of th
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Depends where. Zip drives were present but kind of niche on my circle. You still needed floppies because that's what most computers had until cheap CD-R disks became a thing.
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Indeed. I never had a Zip disc (I had a Jaz drive [wikipedia.org] instead) but yeah that article is BS. While Jaz disks never gained much popularity the Zip disks were quite popular as the floppy disc slowly died until CD-Rs stopped being so flaky.
Tom (Score:2)
Off Topic, Zip Slack! (Score:2)
My first distro, Zip Slack, though slow to load over a parallel port, once loaded was better than Win 98.
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This is BS. The Zip Drive was quite popular.
You and I use the word "popular" very differently. I've only ever seen Zip Drives in a commercial setting. Never in any consumer setup. And I spent my days surrounded by nerds playing with computers.
The only reason I had a Zip Drive is because one was being thrown away at my father's office, it became quickly apparent that it was absolutely useless as a way to transfer data to anyone else because literally no one I knew had one.
It was popular enough to have four varieties
That is also not an indication of popularity. It's an indication that a product
Re: BS (Score:2)
I've got one on my work keyring (Score:2)
It's 32GB; the USB connector itself is about 90% of the volume of the entire drive. Has (among other things) a live Linux Mint image on it. Even with a multi-gigabit wired network, kickstart server, etc. readily available - that simple little thumb drive comes in very handy at times.
Sucky writing. (Score:5, Insightful)
> Iomega Zip Drive
Certianly copuld not astore 750mb in 1994.
Also needed a new version of the drive to do so, likewise with the 250mb in the middle.
However 250 and 750 were too late becuase of cd writers being cheap enough in compariason and the cost of the cd's so little in comparison that that throw binning rather than reusing was the norm.
And lost to hard drives? No lost to cdr. FFS obviously written by someone not there at the time.
Fame != Success (Score:4, Insightful)
A good idea or invention will (usually) make you some money. Being famous is something that requires both a desire for fame (which not everyone has) and a talent for self-promotion. It also doesn't hurt to be charming and physically attractive.
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It also doesn't hurt to be charming and physically attractive.
That's certainly how 93 Escort Wagon came to be a household name around the world!
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It also doesn't hurt to be charming and physically attractive.
That's certainly how 93 Escort Wagon came to be a household name around the world!
Not because you can't beat the bandwidth of a 93 Escort Wagon with a load of zip drives/thumb drives?
I standardized on 128gb flash drives a while ago - loan them out to friends, etc. Now the way they're coming down in price, I'll probably have to switch to 1tb in a few years. It's a great time to be alive.
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I don't even know who invented the 8", 5.25", or 3.5" floppies.
The best I can do is I know of this one hippy who figured out how to make a 5.25" drive with 10% of the chips and use CLV to store more data.
in 2004 I paid $99 US for a 4GB usb stick.. (Score:2)
I still have it. But the last one I bought was a bag of 5, for 15 bucks, of 32GB.
Time flies. Well, when you get to be my age it doesn't fly anymore, it outright does warp jumps.
Babylon 5 "Data Crystal" (Score:2)
Before that, it was Star Trek's tapes.
Re: Babylon 5 "Data Crystal" (Score:2)
Trust issues (Score:2)
I have trust issues with usb keys. Never story your only copy on 5 squared mm of flash.
It is that a single mp3 or photo takes 3 3.5" floppies to store, else i'd take a floppy over an usb key any day.
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I have trust issues with usb keys. Never story your only copy on 5 squared mm of flash.
Agreed. I have owned many flash drives over the years. I've had quite a few fail as well. If you use them for backup, make sure they are not your only backup.
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You can't trust USB drives, but they are far more reliable than floppies, except maybe low density formats on an eight incher.
Just don't expect a single copy of anything to be adequate, and if you can, put it on different kinds of media. No plan is perfect.
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I never really had a reliability problem with floppy disks until 3.5" HD disks in the 90s. I'd be trying to install Slackware without a CD-R burner, downloading one disk while writing a disk while feeding another disk to the installer. Way too many disks had an error somewhere, but at least with the way Slackware worked, I could just try again with another disk of the same files set.
I think the quality went way down when 3.5" HD became an office store commodity that you could buy in 25-disk bricks.
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360kB floppies have much lower bit density than anything else commonly used, 8 inch floppies are the only thing that's much better. Some machines support a whole array of formats, so you could sacrifice capacity for reliability. The 1.44MB format is quite high density, and the average quality of drives had gone down a lot by then as well.
Dunno (Score:5, Funny)
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Kangaroo (Score:2)
I remember seeing advertisements for them and TigerDirect magazines in the 90s.
I think they were called kangaroo and I remember the one gigabyte being over $350
My how I used to stare at those magazines dreaming of building a really sweet computerâ¦
You missed SmartMedia and CompactFlash (Score:2)
Between floppies and pendrives I used SmartMedia and CompactFlash for couple years.
Anyone who had digital camera had them...
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free swag (Score:4, Interesting)
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True - I gave 512MB drives to clients for Chirstmas one year c. 2007. $50ish a piece; they loved them.
I still have one with my BIOS files on it. Works fine.
Why everybody remember ZIP and not Syquest? (Score:2)
I became a fan of Syquest drives. The original (as far as I know) was a roughly 5 1/4" hard disk (and I DO mean "hard", both in the packaging and the platter). They kept advancing until they topped out at 270 MB per disk in a 3.5" form factor. I ended up with a stack of about a dozen. I finally installed an old SCSI adapter in my more modern computer and transferred all of them to my much larger standard hard drive. Probabl
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At one point I did support for a lot of publishing companies and literally everybody used Syquest. They would load up their enormous PSD/AI files and hop on a subway to their favorite service bureau for large printouts. The PS renders took nearly as long as the printer.
USA, USA, USA! (Score:2)
They're English-speaking US-ians, that's why Henn Tran is forgotten. It reveals how imperialism can unintentionally devalue history for the whole world.
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I won't dispute that racism or nationalism persists, but in this case thumb-drive was just the combining existing technology in fairly obvious ways.
Granted, Steve Jobs arguably did the same thing, but his most successful ideas didn't get significant patents either (despite trying). He was a great consumer "packager" in that he knew what to include and what to exclude and made sure it was intuitive and reasonably affordable. He was a great "factorer" of many aspects at the same time. The early iPhones were s
You'e omitting a step between floppy and thumbs... (Score:2)
Before flash drives we had USB CF flash media readers and writers. In late 90s I remember blowing the mind of a fellow at a seminar by copying a 30MB file to a 64MB CD card then moving the reader to his laptop and copying the file. Short of burning a CD, there was no way to do something like that then.
Trek (Score:2)
Trek 2000... (Score:2)
whoever invented the thumbdrive (Score:2)
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Appl will still claim they invented it...
Jennifer Lawrence might do that as well.
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Who wAs that guy who cLaimed he invented the internet? Can't remember his name, but he had a certain 'rithm.
Hal Bore?
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They were horribly slow and caused IO blocking on Windows
I'll bet that was only with the parallel port version, which most Windows users would have used if they didn't have the internal IDE version.