Who invented the thumb drive?
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
The USB physical form-factor and electrical signals were 1996 but the protocol for storage devices appears to be later in 1998:
Universal Serial Bus Mass Storage Class Specification Overview V1.0 Revision October 22, 1998 : https://cscott.net/usb_dev/data/devclass/usbmassover_10.pdf
Back in the day, some of my friends called thumbdrives MSDs, because when you plugged one in, Windows would show a popup telling you that it found a new USB Mass Storage Device. I don't recall that initialism catching on with anybody.
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 a hack. :)
Apparently, WinME actually introduced at least one evolutionary improvement that stuck around, and wasn't a complete dead-end.
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.
Windows 2000 was absolutely the OS to have until MS tightened XP with SP2.
ADDED: And as someone else mentioned, you sometimes downloaded drivers. Not everyone had broadband but Internet access was pretty common by then.
(Though, I think you could grab the winme usb drivers and plop them into a 98 install to get universal-ish usb mass storage, and later drives just ended up bundling a generic driver instead of a device specific one on the driver CD)
After installing that driver you'd be able to see the other partition.
20 cents is absurdly expensive, but much less than maintaining a printer for one paper sheet a month at most.
I needed some info when I was playing a video game, so I looked it up and printed out the excerpt that I needed. I could have just loaded it on my phone, but then I'd have find the page again whenever I needed it, and try to avoid all the stupid ads.
I was recently pleasantly surprised that the shop with a printer down the street refuses to take any USBs and only prints what you email them.
No, operating system, thou shalt not be permitted to seek and run executable code automatically on every connected storage media. I thankest thou most assuredly.
They don't accept emails? All the ones I've been to, do.
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.
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.
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.
But elsewhere in the world thumb drives are a very big deal. Like down in Mexico most car stereos will play MP3s directly off a thumb drive. So I learned you give the guy that runs the local internet cafe a few bucks, tell them what kind of music you like, and they fill it up with whatever. Likewise you can get loaded up with tv shows, movies, etc. This is a big deal for people in the very poor countryside.
That was just my experience in Mexico a decade ago, I imagine it's similar a lot of other places in the world.
Though all this cloud DJ shit is trying to change that. I hope it doesn't take
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.
Sure, physically moving the thumb drive from one computer to another takes virtually no time - the bottleneck is getting the bits on and off the thumb drive, which can be quite slow depending on how cheap a thumb drive you happen to have lying around. I would be happy to be able to sustain 100 Mbps (12 MB/s) on transfers to/from my thumb drive!
You can get effectively NVME over USB. Now, the question is, are you using a 5 or 10mbps (or higher with TB/usb4) connection, supported cable, is there a hub in the way restricting traffic, etc.
With most computers, the front ports may or may not be the fastest ports. If there's a front panel USB C connection, that's usually your best bet, then red/yellow ports in the back... Of course, it could be an older device/interface, etc.
I kind of hope that with USB5, they standardize on labelling/cable requirements as well as reduce the "optional" bits to at least fall under one of 2-3 umbrella sets of requirements. It's a bit of a mess.
All of that said, I have nvme drives over USB that are at least as fast as a SATA connected drive, and generally much faster depending on the port used.
It's not as fast as a USB-C to USB-C cable that can do 40gbps with IP-over-thunderbolt, but good enough for most use cases.
Sometimes, it's just easier to SneakerNet that chongus mass of "the most important data ever".
My car has a usb drive with my favorite music.
At work pluggiing one into a machine would get you fired and questioned by authorities. If we have to sneakernet files it means burning them to a CD or DVD...
I only ever saw one machine with one of those in though and of course it was at school, running useless software for us
Though Wikipedia lists quite wide range of sizes none at 512KB.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#Sizes,_performance...
Though it all happened in a few years, when the 3.5 came out most if not all the 5.25 were already 1.2MB, and the first 3.5 were advertised for their robustness, not for their capacity (which was initially inferior).
https://www.webcommand.net/index.php/2019/07/31/does-anyone-...
My father drove me to a company that had their used system for sale. It was embedded in a desk, the screen was minuscule.
I don't know what impressed me more: that when I asked (politely, looking for a reason to walk without offending the seller) how much memory it had, they started counting bytes included in the manual, or the 8'' floppies. Those were big.
5.25" disks were 40 track, 9 sectors per track with 512 byte sectors for 180KB per side. For 3.5" disks, the definition was 80 track so 360KB per side.
High-density increased the number of sectors per track to 15 for 5.25" (600KB per side) and to 18 for 3.5" (720KB per side).
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 look it up just now to confirm.
I remember seeing something about floppies and how the technology just sort of stopped advancing for awhile even though there was a need for improved capacity. It talked about how there was actually a lot of low hanging fruit that just was never picked, like how the obvious idea of storing more bits on the outer edges of the disk (where the circumference was larger) never was implemented.
I remember using spanned zips to ferry MP3s around on multiple floppies in the mid 90s. CD burners weren't super common and wasting a single disk for transferring 10s of megabytes seemed silly. For awhile there zip disks felt like they were going to replace them and did have a heyday until flash drives showed up. Both were tech that felt super late in arrival for how badly needed they were at the time.
My memories of growing up were of my parents listening to the oldies station, and how that music was ancient! And here I am with an understanding that—to them, listening at that time—the music was just "a few years ago".
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 the time.
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.
Most flash drives which seemingly randomly failed were of the cheap tradeshow variety.
(I boot it a few times a year, mostly to show younger colleagues that whining about how terribly dated the PS4 is now that the PS5 is (somewhat) available won't get them much sympathy from someone who played games on the C64 in the mid-eighties...)
So, at least one data point for a carelessly stored floppy from a name brand still doing what it is expected to more than a third of a century later!
There is something satisfying about the mechanical chunk when they the disk snaps in though.
Never underestimate the power of a Tesla Electric Truck carrying 4 tons of 32TB USB sticks barreling down the highway from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
Still beats the fastest bandwidth of the latest satellite laser LAN.
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 the USB plug is on a short cord - the places where I had to plug it in didn't always allow for easily inserting a short rectangular stick - they either stuck out too far for where the computer was or required moving other things out of the way. This one let me plug it in with minimal obstruction to other things in a cluttered USB port area.
In recent years, for the occasional need to physically move some files, I've been using my phone as USB storage. Or, in the very rare case that isn't enough, a portable HDD or portable SSD drive.
EDIT: As mentioned in a reply, I still have a bunch of USB sticks I bought bought some 8-12 years ago, before counterfeiting was that big of a deal. In a very rare case I need to make a bootable drive, I reach into the desk drawer and dust one off.
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[0] - That's one of the nastiest form of fraud/counterfeiting I've ever experienced in the computing space. Less performant or even less functional hardware is one thing, but a 256 MB USB stick that pretends to be a 4 GB one will happily accept the first few files a typical user would put on it, lulling them into false sense of security, and then silently drop everything that's over 256 MB - a fact the user would only discover when trying to read back the data they "stored" on the USB stick, often days later, long after deleting the original files. I imagine it still beats ransomware on the metric of "priceless photos of loved ones forever lost, because some asshole thought they found a clever way to make money".
I guess I just like redundancy, having control over my own physical storage, have a sort of backup routine (cloud for super frequent temporary storage, flash for less frequent more capacity, and SDD for even less frequent even higher capacity) and flash drives are super portable. I tend to buy them in the biggest fastest format I can, and pay extra for a brand name from a vendor I trust.
I suppose I could use my phone; I hadn't thought of that, but I like to leave as much space as possible for stuff on there, and I'd still not want some backup for that.
This may be a more recent development, but I was recently buying an external SSD for my in-laws, and current options on the market are ~credit card sized (though thicker) and store a terabyte. It's already small enough I'd worry about misplacing it, but also small enough it would fit in my coat pocket, and there surely are smaller options.
I'm like you wrt. controlling my own physical storage - it's just repeated bad experiences with USB sticks and SD cards that made me reluctant to ever spend money on them ever again. Even with SD cards, I just reuse the few good ones I got some 6 years ago (there's one I use for phones, and a few I got sitting inside Raspberry Pis).
> I suppose I could use my phone; I hadn't thought of that, but I like to leave as much space as possible for stuff on there, and I'd still not want some backup for that.
Same here - if I use my phone in this role, it's strictly temporary, just to transfer data between machines. Space on the phone is precious - in my experience, no matter how much of it you have, it will mysteriously disappear somewhere within a year, leaving you with a phone barely capable of storing recent photos and few apps before it starts choking due to lack of space...
(I say somewhere because I really have no idea where - on my Android phones, the "storage use breakdown" in settings feels like it never adds up.)
Photographers.
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 streaming G-code over USB, which tended to cause unreliable prints (my favorite example was a 3D printer builder and a popularizer in our local Hackerspace, who figured out he can't leave a print job running and give the computer to his kid to play videogames on, because any larger load would slow G-code transmission rate, throw off timings, and completely ruin the print). But I would think these days the printers would be built with some on-board buffer storage and network connectivity. ESP32 is a thing.
Network-attached might work, but that probably complicates the device UI substantially-- some way to bind it to a WLAN, possibly even set up non-DHCP network configuration.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004771224597.html
(first result on aliexpress, I have no idea if it's any good or not)
Or, some do as I do, and just play music straight from the phone speakers.
You're probably not using them to transfer files between desktop or laptop computers anymore, but they have their place with more specialized devices.
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.
More than 20 years later, they are indeed dirty cheap. However, I often find them to be unreliable with slow/unsteady real speeds.
Meanwhile, small NVMe-based devices in either this thumb-format or SD-format (5 years in the making [1]) are still not very popular, so the prices are high. Or is it the other way around?
Consumer devices don't need storage that fast and those prosumer/pro devices that do either use USB-C SSDs (e.g. Blackmagic's camera lineup [0]), outright SSDs (BlackMagic's fixed-studio equipment [1]) or CFexpress which actually is PCIe under the hood (Nikon, Sony and Panasonic all offer CFexpress support on their recent models of higher priced camera systems). Prices are very high, but that's justifiable IMO - unlike with SD cards or USB sticks where all the low-quality-binned flash chips go, CFexpress flash chips have to be the best of the best of the binning because they couldn't keep up with the performance and endurance that professional equipment demands.
[0] https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/de/products/blackmagicursam...
[1] https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/de/products/blackmagicmulti...
I loved the Steam Deck from the onset, but was always confused why nobody mentioned how slow and unresponsive the main menus were... Yeah, hindsight is 20/20.
Games still ran fine off of the slower card, but every part of the experience saw a dramatic improvement after I switched to a higher-spec SD card.
I'm more concerned with the reliability (in my experience). The middle-priced ones are not necessarily better than the cheapest ones.
> Higher speeds are more difficult to achieve
I'm not asking for 1000 MB/s write speed. Why do I still sometimes get 10MB/s in 2023? Is it much to expect around 100 MB/s write (HDD-level speeds) in most "average" thumb-drive?
Scanning something and saving it directly to USB at the MFC takes multiple minutes if its anything more than a few pages.
The quality of these things has really gone down as they've gotten commoditized, it seems.
In 2018 Huwaeii was the first to introduce into the market via their Mate 20 Pro. Samsung added it a year later in a Galaxy Phone calling it "Wireless PowerShare." Their been rumors Apple will add it too.
I've always wondered if my pitch on that TV show to Mark Burnett(creator of the voice, survivor, shark tank, etc) & Intel was the spark for it all or they'd been working on it prior. I would hope Intel created some patents around it as overall it was just idea I pitched on recorded video for the show to Mark and folks at Intel.
I'm not a mechanical or battery engineer rather a web developer. Would be cool to see if my idea (was at a tech event & phone died yet was surrounded by tons of powered up devices) was the first that sparked reverse wireless charging.
Made in China has changed a lot of things. It doesn't matter who really invented thumb drives. I think the first mass production/sale of thumb drives happened in China. That's the reason the patent was granted to Netac.
Even between the same brand, one drive can be great, the other is slower than dirt (even with USB 3), is unreliable, etc.
> Multiple individuals have staked a claim to being the inventor of the USB flash drive. On April 5, 1999, Amir Ban, Dov Moran, and Oron Ogdan of M-Systems, an Israeli company, filed a patent application entitled "Architecture for a Universal Serial Bus-Based PC Flash Disk".
Of course, at some point the prices dropped, and eventually some people ended up owning a dozen USB sticks of various sizes and shapes, some of which used for archiving, but none of them labeled.
The case/mechanism was similar to this:
https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-6bkt1ygjlf/images/stencil/60...
but they were sold in boxes of 10 or 12, I cannot remember if they were 1 or 2 GB capacity.
EDIT:
found an actual picture of them:
http://www.usbmemorysticks.net/wp-content/gallery/pny-third-...
they were 2 and 4 GB.
With flash drives, If you're lucky, you get a colour assortment in the box.
I bought a packet of 5x16Gb drives, and I can't tell which ones are the "partitioned strange for use with a vintage machine" versus "my brother's backups".
If you go to some service that offers prints and use your usb drive there, Im like 100% sure you will get multiple viruses.
I dont understand why the operating systems dont seem to be able to defend themselves against it. Also in the past the drives had a "read only" mode, nowadays this is hard to find.
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 1994 a 1 GB SCSI drive cost over $1000 the largest IDE drives were about 250 MB, new PCs were shipping with 130 MB drives and 486 CPUs. If you need more than 1.44 MB of removable storage you chose between a tape backup and the rarer more expensive Bernolli drives; both requiring a SCSI interface. Tape drives were relatively inexpensive, slow and didn't do random access; reading or wring everything serially and it took hours to restore files. Bernolli drives were expensive and unreliable; the fail state was a damaged drive head.
I remember having an Irwin 40 MB tape drive that I used to backup games from my 100 MB Western Digital HDD. While tape was slow, it was still faster than installing Wing Commander or Papyrus Nascar Racing from 2 dozen floppy disks. It was also unattended unlike floppy.
When the Zip Drive arrived in 1994 it offered 100 MB of external storage in similar capacities to comparably priced tape drives for similar prices. It was random access like a floppy disk and you could read off of it rather than having to copy the files to your HDD like with Tape. It was also much faster and the parallel port version could be hot swapped without rebooting.
CD-Rs wouldn't be a thing for a couple years, they wouldn't be affordable for a couple more, and they wouldn't be reliable for a couple more. Initial drives didn't come with buffers and needed high performance machines, later buffered drives could still underflow if your PC couldn't keep the buffer filled. Burning disks was a ceremony where you carefully shutdown anything running and defragged your HDD to ensure nothing would interrupt the burning process. Everyone had a spindle of failed burns. Even when CD-Rs and CD-RWs finally arrived, they were slow. The ZIP drive was comparable to an 8x CD-ROM and those speeds for R/RW were still years away.
For a 6 year period after the initial 100 MB drive launched, the Zip drive was a big deal. I don't know what their definition of "widespread popularity" was but Iomega was huge for a time and quietly died off in the early 2000s.
When Iomega launched the Zip 250 in 1999, ZDNet wrote [0]:
> "...Iomega is poised to expand its already massive share of the removable storage market."
> "The biggest name in removable storage just got bigger thanks to the Zip drive's increased capacity--it now holds a generous 250MB of data."
The 750 MB version wouldn't arrive until 2002 as a last dying gasp from Iomega in an attempt to compete with CD-R/RW.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20001119014500/http://www8.zdnet...
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.
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.
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.
"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..
I haven't heard that one. Did you have one of those HP CD Writers with purple button and no buffer too?
Sites which choose to store zero PD (which includes e.g. not logging IP addresses) are GDPR compliant automatically, but still need to notify about cookies if using them.
edit: though, having looked at their privacy policy it seems they do use PD... so yeah, not good (unless I'm misunderstanding their tracking policy which I don't think I am) https://www.ieee.org/security-privacy.html
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.