USB Flash Drive
Posted by jgiors on 2007-01-25
I finally picked up a 1 GB USB flash drive [actually, it was a few months ago, but I digress].
Maybe it’s because I’m an “old timer”, but 1GB in a tiny package at an “impulse buy” price point is just incredible. No wonder the 1.44 MB floppy disk is dead. This little flash drive holds almost as much data as 700 of those floppies, it’s small enough to leave on your keychain, and it’s far more durable.
Thinking even farther back, I remember when I loaded programs for my Atari 800 from a cassette tape! It took several minutes just to load a few dozen K of data. It was a big deal when I finally got a 5-1/4″ floppy drive. I got a special “double-density” drive which held about 180KB (you could flip the disk over to get another 180KB, for a total of 360KB)…So my flash drive holds almost as much as 3000 of those old floppies! Wow.
Andy Wendt said
I vaguely remember an old game about the Winter Olympics that I loaded from 1.44mb floppies; specifically I remember that it included a target shooting event in the Pentathlon. Having been a long time collector of firearms I was thrilled when I heard that first riffle shot come out of the little external speakers on my AT 286-12Mhz system. I know then that someday things were really going to be good.
jgiors said
Hi Andy,
I remember a lot of the old games, too (some more vaguely than others). Mentioning Winter Olympics reminded me about Summer Games by Epyx. We enjoyed it not so much as an excellent game per se, but more as a game you could really “play” with instead of following the rules.
One of the events was a diving competition. Sometimes we would complete for top score, but often our “competition” devolved into attempting to get zero points with the most complex dive by belly-flopping at the very end. It was almost as difficult to get zeros as to get a 10, so it was pretty entertaining, losing with a score of 0.1 to a “perfect 0″.