SD - Arduino Sketches: Tools and Techniques for Programming Wizardry - page 209

Technology continued to advance, and more and more i les were created
digitally. Businesses could i nd themselves submerged with l oppies, and data
retrieval could be extremely slow because a lot of time was taken i nding the
right l oppy. Also, l oppy disks were not the most reliable medium possible.
(Older readers might remember the infamous Abort, Retry, Ignore message.)
The solution came, and it was called the hard drive.
A hard drive is, essentially, a l oppy disk that cannot be removed. Original
models could hold just a few megabytes, but it didn't take long to increase stor-
age space—from 20 megabytes to 40, 120, 340, 540.... The gigabyte barrier was
broken in the early 1990s. However, this was not the end of l oppies, far from it.
Operating systems and programs were still sold on l oppies, and backups used
l oppy disks. However, another problem was noticed.
With the advance into the digital era, everything ended up on a computer—
letters, books, photos, images, and music. It was easy to add a few hard drives
onto a computer until internal space ran out, but the industry's main problem
was data exchange; the ability of transferring data from one computer to another.
A simple Word document could be just a few kilobytes in size, but add a few
images or photos, and it could become bigger than a l oppy disk, the only medium
used to transfer data from one location to another. The Internet wasn't available
everywhere and most certainly not at the speeds required to transfer megabytes
of data. We would have to wait a few years for high-speed devices like USB. I
can remember receiving parcels containing dozens of l oppy disks containing
programs. (Windows 3.1 came on 7 l oppy disks; Windows NT 3.1 came on 22.)
CD drives offered a solution, the medium is capable of storing 650 to 700
MB of data. Applications could be shipped on a single CD, and the increase
in size meant that applications became more and more multimedia-oriented.
Microsoft Encarta was a revolution for its time—an entire encyclopedia on a
CD. However, it wasn't the most effective data transfer device possible, being a
write-once read-many media. After a CD was “burned,” it couldn't be erased.
Different techniques were used, including the possibility to rewrite CD media,
but a new technology put a stop to all that.
The Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an extension for PCs and mobile devices.
Developed in the mid-1990s, the i nal USB 1 specii cation was released in January
1996. Until USB, shopping for peripherals was a nightmare. A printer would use
a parallel port, but so would a scanner and a Zip drive. A mouse might use a
serial port, but so would a modem and a programmer. Expansion ports were
sold, adding serial ports, parallel ports, PS/2 ports, and so on. USB revolutionized
all this—printers, scanners, mice, modems, even some l oppy drives. All these
peripherals could use USB, and it was embraced by the industry. However, the
industry was about to try something else. In the year 2000, the i rst USB l ash
drive was created, as shown in Figure 12-2.