USB Memory sticks

[The Natural Philosopher]

^^^^^

Proves my point. Obsolete, worthless - have to give 'em away

[The Natural Philosopher]

There are chips that have passed tests and chips that have failed.

[Jim Hawkins]

Thanks for the tip Brian! I tried simply pushing the USB plug firmly back into the plastic case - and the thing now works! I've copied everything onto another drive now in case it does finally give up.

Jim Hawkins

[gremlin_95]

I remember when I started secondary school back in 2006, I was well respected for having a 1GB memory stick :-) I was one of 2 who had one with such a large capacity at the time. I have just been given a free

2GB one from work!

[polygonum]

I remember at my secondary school being given some punch cards and being pointed at a hand-punch and a code chart. And we were incredibly ahead of most schools...

[D.M.Chapman]

Used to recommend the Sandisk titanium but they stopped making them a while back :-(

Now tend to use these

from the fastest, but reliable, and made of metal. I've had one on my office keyring for many months and it's not showing any sign of wear (unlike the plastic ones that only last a few weeks...)

Darren

[Davey]

That is worth knowing, thanks. It fits the death of my first stick, suddenly it refused to connect. No point even looking for it now, I think it was a massive 256k in size.

[geoff]

I use them to back up my company database

I always use two

[geoff]

I remember getting shown an "electronic calculator" at school

about the size of a desktop PC

[Phil Addison]

Wow.. punch cards, how modern... we had to make do with coils of 7-hole punched paper tape and could do some crafty editing with a hand punch if the character we wanted happened to have more holes than the one that needed editing. I remember you could delete a character by punching out all the remaining holes (127 = delete). We were coding in Algol-60 on an Elliot 803 IIRC.

Phil

[Bob Eager]

It would have been 9-hole (8 data plus one sprocket)!

I worked with 5-hole (OK, 6) tape for a while. It came off teleprinters but we fed it into an ICL 1902S.

[Phil Addison]

At my first job in the 60's they had electro-mechanical "desk-top" calculators (Friden?), green beasts about 1/2 the size of a typewriter with typewriter-like keys. Clever bit of kit though ISTR they could do long devision and square roots, lord knows how they did it.

Phil

[Phil Addison]

It did come off teleprinters, that's what we typed the code on. Maybe it was 5 hole (I don't count the sprocket), it certainly only supported upper case but 32 characters doesn't sound enough for Algol text. Are you sure it couldn't be 7-hole, I seem to recall it was an odd number with the sprocket hole not quite in the centre, e.g. 4 holes + sprocket

• 3 holes, but its very hazy now.

Phil

[brass monkey]

Good god, Bob. I trust your slippers are warming by the fire? LOL I remember playing startrek on a teletype 43 and pdp9 (i think).

42'ish years back.

[Jules Richardson]

One possible gotcha: if one dies, do make sure that it wasn't the computer that you just plugged it in to which was responsible before immediately trying the other :-)

[Jules Richardson]

Shame nobody ever gives away RAM like that; this 'ere comp could use a bit more!

I don't think I've ever needed more than a 1GB on a USB stick. In most cases, I've just needed a few MB for whatever reason (and a fair few of those cases would have been OK with a floppy, were such things really still around :-)

cheers

Jules

[Jules Richardson]

In my day it were t'abacus, and it were uphill both ways in the snow :)

(Nah, I missed all the good stuff - the computing industry got dull as dishwater at about the same time I graduated, bah!)

cheers

Jules

[Bob Eager]

That was actually 39 years ago! I had a vacation job working for Advance Linen (roller towels in pub loos, etc.) and 5 track tape was how their depots sent back stock levels every day....

[Bob Eager]

We weren't using it for Algol. But it could have been used; there were in- band shift characters.

8 hole, 5 one side and 3 the other. You can see some here, just a little way down on the right: shows 7 holes, sure, but the capacity for an 8th hole was there. Not used for source text, but used for storing a full byte when storing binary information (the 1902S operating system was on paper tape, although it used disks for data storage).

[Bob Martin]

I just bought two 16GB sticks for under £8