Who invented the thumb drive?
&gt; The Iomega Zip Drive, called a “superfloppy” drive and introduced in 1994, could store up to 750 MB of data and was writable, but it never gained widespread popularity, partly due to competition from cheaper and higher-capacity hard drives.<p>I&#x27;ve heard or read a few stories about the Zip Drive recently and they all seem to compress the 10ish years of existence and completely downplay it&#x27;s impact or significance.<p>In 1994 a 1 GB SCSI drive cost over $1000 the largest IDE drives were about 250 MB, new PCs were shipping with 130 MB drives and 486 CPUs.  If you need more than 1.44 MB of removable storage you chose between a tape backup and the rarer more expensive Bernolli drives; both requiring a SCSI interface.  Tape drives were relatively inexpensive, slow and didn&#x27;t do random access; reading or wring everything serially and it took hours to restore files.  Bernolli drives were expensive and unreliable; the fail state was a damaged drive head.<p>I remember having an Irwin 40 MB tape drive that I used to backup games from my 100 MB Western Digital HDD.  While tape was slow, it was still faster than installing Wing Commander or Papyrus Nascar Racing from 2 dozen floppy disks. It was also unattended unlike floppy.<p>When the Zip Drive arrived in 1994 it offered 100 MB of external storage in similar capacities to comparably priced tape drives for similar prices. It was random access like a floppy disk and you could read off of it rather than having to copy the files to your HDD like with Tape.  It was also much faster and the parallel port version could be hot swapped without rebooting.<p>CD-Rs wouldn&#x27;t be a thing for a couple years, they wouldn&#x27;t be affordable for a couple more, and they wouldn&#x27;t be reliable for a couple more.  Initial drives didn&#x27;t come with buffers and needed high performance machines, later buffered drives could still underflow if your PC couldn&#x27;t keep the buffer filled.  Burning disks was a ceremony where you carefully shutdown anything running and defragged your HDD to ensure nothing would interrupt the burning process.  Everyone had a spindle of failed burns.  Even when CD-Rs and CD-RWs finally arrived, they were slow.  The ZIP drive was comparable to an 8x CD-ROM and those speeds for R&#x2F;RW were still years away.<p>For a 6 year period after the initial 100 MB drive launched, the Zip drive was a big deal.  I don&#x27;t know what their definition of &quot;widespread popularity&quot; was but Iomega was huge for a time and quietly died off in the early 2000s.<p>When Iomega launched the Zip 250 in 1999, ZDNet wrote [0]:<p>&gt; &quot;...Iomega is poised to expand its already massive share of the removable storage market.&quot;<p>&gt; &quot;The biggest name in removable storage just got bigger thanks to the Zip drive&#x27;s increased capacity--it now holds a generous 250MB of data.&quot;<p>The 750 MB version wouldn&#x27;t arrive until 2002 as a last dying gasp from Iomega in an attempt to compete with CD-R&#x2F;RW.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20001119014500&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www8.zdnet.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;stories&#x2F;reviews&#x2F;0,4161,388070,00.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20001119014500&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www8.zdnet...</a>