7 ms·

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 los

by Neil44 4y ago

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 the time.

bheadmaster 4y ago
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/949/ https://xkcd.com/949/
- egberts1 4y ago
  To upgrade an old saying: 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.
  - nso 4y ago
    Not necessarily the most practical if you include write/read time
  - kevinmhickey 4y ago
    Thumb drives in a truck offer great bandwidth but terrible latency.
  - CobaltFire 4y ago
    Not everything needs to have Musks companies shoehorned in.
  - porkbeer 4y ago
    Tesla trucks are a bad application here, even though you were conspicously careful to keep your route quite short.
asvitkine 4y ago
To be fair, floppies were pretty easy, just had no capacity.
- the_third_wave 4y ago
  Not to mention little reliability, especially in the latter years. Things got progressively worse going from 5¼" ~170K single-sided CBM-1541 to 5¼" 360K double-sided to 5¼" 1.2M to 3½" 720 to 3½" 1.44M. I never really used 8" floppies due to the lack of hardware so I can't say whether those were better or worse than their 5¼" successors but the hardware and (especially) media took a downturn in the latter years of the 3½" period.
  - lb1lf 4y ago
    Out of curiosity, your comment made me fire up the C64 and 1541 I keep as a conversation starter in my office. It still loads the, uh, evaluation copy of Defender of the Crown which 1988 me copied onto a 3M DS,DD floppy in February of that year, if the scrawny handwriting on the label is to be believed. (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!
- delecti 4y ago
  They were also vastly more error prone. Maybe my experience isn't representative, but floppy drives were always janky, and floppy discs failed all the time, while I can't remember a USB drive ever dying. I lost lots of files on floppies.
  - vel0city 4y ago
    I've had lots of USB flash drives fail but usually in a context where they experienced a high number of writes which makes some sense. Most flash drives which seemingly randomly failed were of the cheap tradeshow variety.
jarenmf 4y ago
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.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  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.
bombolo 4y ago
> 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. 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.
- giaour 4y ago
  When was this? I recall carrying a USB stick with a bootable image in the early 2000s because it was reasonable to assume BIOS support for reading from USB. I also remember carrying a separate stick with "portable apps" that I could plug in and run on any Windows computer I happened to find myself using.
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    I believe that Windows ME was the first (non NT based) windows with out-of-the-box support for USB MSC, though 98 probably got it in a service pack at some point to support it. Certainly in 1999 there was a good chance that a USB stick would not work in a computer. By the time XP was common, USB sticks worked everywhere.
  - bombolo 4y ago
    Late windows 95/early windows 98 was my first computer with a single usb port and no drivers for usb memories.
aidenn0 4y ago
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.

by Neil44 4y ago

bheadmaster 4y ago

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/949/ https://xkcd.com/949/

egberts1 4y ago
To upgrade an old saying: 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.
- nso 4y ago
  Not necessarily the most practical if you include write/read time
- kevinmhickey 4y ago
  Thumb drives in a truck offer great bandwidth but terrible latency.
- CobaltFire 4y ago
  Not everything needs to have Musks companies shoehorned in.
- porkbeer 4y ago
  Tesla trucks are a bad application here, even though you were conspicously careful to keep your route quite short.

asvitkine 4y ago

To be fair, floppies were pretty easy, just had no capacity.

the_third_wave 4y ago
Not to mention little reliability, especially in the latter years. Things got progressively worse going from 5¼" ~170K single-sided CBM-1541 to 5¼" 360K double-sided to 5¼" 1.2M to 3½" 720 to 3½" 1.44M. I never really used 8" floppies due to the lack of hardware so I can't say whether those were better or worse than their 5¼" successors but the hardware and (especially) media took a downturn in the latter years of the 3½" period.
- lb1lf 4y ago
  Out of curiosity, your comment made me fire up the C64 and 1541 I keep as a conversation starter in my office. It still loads the, uh, evaluation copy of Defender of the Crown which 1988 me copied onto a 3M DS,DD floppy in February of that year, if the scrawny handwriting on the label is to be believed. (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!
delecti 4y ago
They were also vastly more error prone. Maybe my experience isn't representative, but floppy drives were always janky, and floppy discs failed all the time, while I can't remember a USB drive ever dying. I lost lots of files on floppies.
- vel0city 4y ago
  I've had lots of USB flash drives fail but usually in a context where they experienced a high number of writes which makes some sense. Most flash drives which seemingly randomly failed were of the cheap tradeshow variety.

jarenmf 4y ago

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.

aidenn0 4y ago
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.

bombolo 4y ago

> 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. 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.

giaour 4y ago
When was this? I recall carrying a USB stick with a bootable image in the early 2000s because it was reasonable to assume BIOS support for reading from USB. I also remember carrying a separate stick with "portable apps" that I could plug in and run on any Windows computer I happened to find myself using.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  I believe that Windows ME was the first (non NT based) windows with out-of-the-box support for USB MSC, though 98 probably got it in a service pack at some point to support it. Certainly in 1999 there was a good chance that a USB stick would not work in a computer. By the time XP was common, USB sticks worked everywhere.
- bombolo 4y ago
  Late windows 95/early windows 98 was my first computer with a single usb port and no drivers for usb memories.

aidenn0 4y ago

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.