It’s been just over 20 years since the first personal computer arrived on the scene. Costing around $3,000, the IBM personal computer was the first one in the marketplace. Today, IBM’s focus is in servers and business technology, and is virtually unknown in the home computer environment.
I can remember getting my first computer. It was an Amiga 500, with a 1MB memory expansion board! Coming in at something like 7.5 mhz processing speed, that thing was really smokin’. In fact, the only thing I needed to get to make it a top of the line system was a hard drive. You see, back in those days, internal hard drives were virtually unknown. External hard drives were available for extra storage, so you didn’t have to have hundreds of floppy disks laying around (although all of my friends did anyway!).
With hard drives as large as 20MB, those first computers were the envy of everyone who didn’t have one. When my frinds got a 40MB external drive for their Amiga 3000, we thought they would never be able to utilize all of that storage space. Today, of course, we all know differently. It is amazing how far technology has come in just a few short years. Which brings me to the title of this post … and portable information devices.
In particular, I’m going to bring up USB flash drives. Now consider this device. Powered by the voltage from the USB port, these small memory devices really are using flash-card type memory to store files. This is the same type of memory that is used in digital cameras, etc. The main difference, of course, is the amount of information you can store, and the type.
Using a flash drive on a USB port is not only feasible, but actually a very interesting way to transfer data. You can create file folders, and load up any type of file that you would have on your hard drive into your USB flash drive! On older computers this is a bit of a pain, as the USB port is located in the back of the computer. However, on most newer computers, there is at least one USB port located on the front of the computer somewhere. This makes using a flash drive more convenient and useful than ever.
So how much storage is available? Well, I just got my first flash drive at 128MB … which will hold over 88 floppy’s worth of information. But I’m cheap. I wanted to try out the low end of the market first to see how I liked it. Flash drives are available all the way up to 1GB at this point. Talk about the proliferation of technology! 20 years ago, 1GB on a hard drive was impossible. Today, you can hold 1GB of portable information storage in the palm of your hand!
A few years ago, computer manufacturers starting looking at leaving off the “A:” drive … you know, the floppy. This was due primarily to the fact that most software manufacturers were no longer using the floppy disk as a storage medium. In fact, most computers today are configured to boot up using the CD-Rom drive as a secondary boot source. This means you can boot from a CD instead of your hard drive. This feature is useful when combating certain tech problems, but used to be held only for the floppy drive. So, it is apparent that the floppy drive is on it’s way out permanently as a storage medium.
What is not so apparent at the moment, however, is what will be taking it’s place. A few years ago I would have said the CD-RW device was going to be the new storage medium of the 21st century. Today, I think I’ve changed my mind. With USB data transfer speeds increasing with the USB 2.0 compliant port, and these small thumb-sized flash drives holding (as of current investigation) up to 2.0 GB, I’m picking these devices as the medium that will replace the portable storage available with floppy or CD-Rom drives.
I don’t think it will be long before you will see programs and software pre-loaded onto USB flash drives. So if you are in need of portable storage for those office files or want an easy back-up for your personal files … consider a USB flash drive. It’s currently your best bet.