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Comment by mk_stjames | Hacker News Reader

It should also be noted that one of the reasons thumb drives took off when they did was not just due to USB.. as technically USB has been around for a few years and there were things like CF card readers coming on the market, and other flash storage readers a few years earlier.. so why did it take until later? Because Win 95 and Win 98 did not have plug and play drivers for USB mass storage devices, at all. I think it wasn't until Win98SE (edit: for true generic controllers it may have been Win2K even?) that there was a USB driver for generic thumb drives. But theoretically the tech was around and could have been implemented as early as 1996.

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>But theoretically the tech was around and could have been implemented as early as 1996.

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

> Universal Serial Bus Mass Storage Class Specification

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.

98SE still needed driver installation for every stick. It was WinME that included the first mass-storage generic class drivers.

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. :)

"Universal" USB stick support came slightly earlier, with 2k. I distinctly remember it being a game-changer

This is definitely one of those little trivia factoids that is surprising to me:

Apparently, WinME actually introduced at least one evolutionary improvement that stuck around, and wasn't a complete dead-end.

Even the worst versions of windows has engineers working on low level iterative improvements, far detached from the product level people who are fucking up the big picture.

I have fond memories of Windows ME. My family upgraded from 95 to ME, skipped 98

It had others like System Restore.

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.

Windows ME still had the same loading sequence as Windows 95/98. That is, DOS kernel booted and then loaded the Windows code. Now it is true that Windows 95 and above mostly bypassed DOS once it was loaded, and DOS was used as merely a boot loader. And Windows ME made that more hidden. But you could still extract a DOS version out of ME (open a command window, use "format /s", then copy the various DOS command executables from the one directory to the floppy). You could then use this to boot DOS, and type "win" or something like that to load Windows ME.

While I agree Win2k was in all ways better, it wasn't cheap relative to ME.

So, did usb sticks come with floppy disks or CDs with a driver?

I think it may have been a mix. There was also a mini CD thing around that time that sometimes got used for drivers. In general, things were switching over to CDs in the late 90s but as I recall floppies were still around for some purposes.

ADDED: And as someone else mentioned, you sometimes downloaded drivers. Not everyone had broadband but Internet access was pretty common by then.

I'd forgotten about those mini-CDs. Part of the unboxing process was making sure you didn't scratch the driver disk.

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.

Sometimes. I recall early thumb drives didn't come in the small blister packs you see by cash registers today. If they didn't come with a CD (or miniCD) you had to go the the manufacturer's site and download the drivers.

Great site. Thanks for providing it

Hmm, I remember still having to install individual drivers for USB thumb drives/sticks on our stock 98SE install. It was only until we "upgraded" to WinME that USB mass storage largely became plug-and-play.

(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)

I remember that and I also remember as well some thumb drives that went ahead an emulated a CD-ROM drive in another partition with the driver installer.

After installing that driver you'd be able to see the other partition.

Android Phones do that today over Mass Storage...

I still remember the first time I ever saw a thumb drive because it was in a spy movie, The Recruit. Immediately went looking for where I could find one.

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