20 cents is absurdly expensive, but much less than maintaining a printer for one paper sheet a month at most.
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.
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.
They don't accept emails? All the ones I've been to, do.
Though all this cloud DJ shit is trying to change that. I hope it doesn't take
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.
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...
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.
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.
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".