Pen Drives

I wonder how many people remember the Tandy computer of the 80's. In the 90's when the Tandy 1000 series were in vogue, I remember some of us had the 20MB hard drive, and among my friends who were DOS savvy and we exchanged ideas about computing, a few had the 40 MB hard drive. They seemed to be in a class by themselves. I remember the technological breakthrough that allowed the hard drive to be expanded to 80MB. We thought we were in hard drive heaven. Jump to the late 90's and end of the century and computing power was accelerating to a level never seen before. The Gigs started coming in, smaller foot print devices were also coming in.

The 21st century saw the demise of the 5.25 disk drive and the proliferation of the CD drive. The USB port was also here, and computing power was super. All the breakthrough were bringing developments into computers. In 1989, Toshiba introduced the NAND flash device which was an invention of Dr. Fujio Masuoka who was working at Toshiba. The flash drive is a result of this invention. It uses tunnel injection for writing and tunnel release for erasing. This is the same technology that is used in the memory cards for cameras and other devices.

These days one would see many people walking around the office or on the subway with flash drives around their necks or on their key chains. Mine has only 512MB. By 2005, Toshiba and San Disk had introduced a flash drive with 1gig capacity. They are also faster to access. How far we have come!