Singing Potatoes
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Tuesday, 21 October 2003
New Toy

I am hopelessly addicted to technology, I know that. But sometimes things are both nifty and useful, like USB flash drives:

In ten years, this will look ridiculously oversized.

Just plug it into the computer, and it acts like a hard drive. It's surprisingly inexpensive; at $33, this 128MB flash drive cost about half as much as the 128MB memstick I just bought as part of Karen's birthday present.

No more emailing myself documents from work to home (and vice versa), or FTPing stuff up to my Web site so that I can grab it later. No more wasting CD-Rs at work because the reporters' laptops need driver updates. (The drivers usually don't fit onto a floppy, most of their machines don't have Ethernet ports, and they can't connect their modems to our digital phone system. Now, though, I can just download the updates directly to the flash drive on my computer, then plug it into their laptops and install from there.)

Amazing. My first computer had a huge motherboard, mostly covered with RAM chips that totalled a whopping 32K. Now they're fitting over four thousand times that amount on a chip about as big as my thumbnail. And this is just a little flash drive; I've seen 2GB drives for sale...

Posted by godfrey (link)
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Comments
You all should have seen his eyes light up when he first saw this gadget...
Posted by Ginevra on 21 Oct 2003 14:35
Wow... your first computer had 32K?!?! Lap of luxury!
Posted by Zach on 22 Oct 2003 06:34
Actually, we spent the extra money to add a 16K daughterboard with integer BASIC built in, so I was really stylin' on a 48K Apple ][ (to paraphrase Scotty, "no bloody plus, e, c or gs").
Posted by Godfrey on 22 Oct 2003 06:38