The New Sneakernet: USB Thumbdrives

First we had the original sneakernet. Moving files from 0ne computer to the other. Some of us were using 90K floppies, which seemed reasonable enough when one concidered that the microcomputers at the time only supported 64K of memory. Although floppy sizes grew it didn't take long to figure out that floppy disks just didn't have a enough capacity to do the job. Along the waythere were bernoulee drives, optical drives, zip drives and superdrives. The problem was the the drives were expencive and proprietory, none ever achieved a real acceptance among most users. CDs and CD worked somewhat. They have 720 Megs of storage and the media is relatively cheap. The problem is that burning to them is time consuming ,requires special software and the software isn't always compatable. Anyone who has burnt CDs has been a victim to Nero, or the Adaptec/Roxio suites. Somes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. It never seems to work right when you are in a hurry and is troublesome if you want to run real applications that might need read write access. even RW CDs are primarily a write once read many media.

Flash memory disks are nothing new. PCMCIA flashcards have been around forever, and they have a standard inerface in most Laptops. We at PCO installed such a flashdrive run system in MEPS 2 A bootable flash drive using DOS 6.22 and another drive that accepted flash cards that ahd the programs, experiment procedures and the collected data. A sneakernet at its finest hour.

USB thumb drives have evolved with the realization on how handy Digital camera memory can be. They are getting cheaper every day. It used to be I took a laptop with me every where I went along with a box heaped full of floppies. The Texas heat and humidity helped assure that the files could be read from the floppies only every once in a while. The Laptop assured that I had all my utilities well in hand and carting it around was pretty good for body building. It also had my email programs with my contact information. I did use a handheld PCs work pretty good a Personal Information Manager, but they don't work to well for sneakernet functions.

USB thumbdrives are not only a good method of moving files around though. They can be a pretty powerful tool. Fer instance.

1. We enter a control room and the Unix based system needs to have some of its configuration and script files restored. We ask to borrow an networked PC. I plug in a USB drive.
   
2. open up Firefox. Thunderbird, or FTP program on the USB drive. Fetch the file into my thumb drive.
3. unzip the file and use the command file2disk.exe to make a tared floppy.
   

What's significant about this is the only thing I needed to bring into the control room was 1 thumbdrive. and perhaps the blank floppy. None of tools I used left a footprint. there is no install process. The programs are all "portable". meaning there is no installation procedure, and no writing to the registry. and No passwords are left behind, because the programs are portable.

A good place to start looking for portable programs would be. at PortableApps.com There a suite of programs can be found, and a whole pile of other applications. Most notably OpenOffice.org Portable. This is a full featured office suite. Presentation, SpreadSheet, Word processor and more and compatable compatable MS Office documents. Its free as is a lot of portable programs don't let the price fool you. Its very good and compares well to the high priced app.

An invaluable tool to me is Calc98, This is a scientific calculator that not only has any practical function I am ever going to use but has a great units conversion feature.

File2dsk & dsk2file Useful for storing Tarred Diskettes to pc files and back again. These are command line programs.

There are also versions of Thunderbird, and Firefox.


These days I find my self running around with a few thumbdrives in my pocket. Some for data backups. A couple for specific software installs. A couple to run a few utilities while "borrowing" a computer and even a couple for crash recovery.