I thouroughly enjoyed reading this. It’s interesting to think about the evolution of transport storage. To this day, the USB thumb drive has proved to be the long-term winner and something I personally use very often. Wanna install Debian or do a clean install of macOS? You’ll likely do it by creating a bootable USB thumb drive.

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 ¼-inch and 3 ½-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…

Would you be surprised to learn that the supposed inventor of the thumb drive is in jail right now in Singapore? But why?