this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
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[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

you could go to your local library and carry a USB stick.

I don't remember it this way. Nothing else came close to the portable storage capacity of CD (and thus CD-R and CD-RW). The iomega zip drive was still a popular medium, allowing rewritable 100mb or 250mb cartridge. That was the preferred way to get big files to and from a computer lab when I was an engineering student in 2000.

USB flash drives had just been released in 2000, and their capacity was measured in like 8/16/32mb, nowhere near enough to meaningfully move CD images.

Then again, as a college student with on-campus broadband on the completely unregulated internet (back when HTTP and the WWW weren't necessarily considered the most important protocols on the internet), it was all about shared FTP logins PMed over IRC to download illegal shit. The good stuff never touched an actual website.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I remember similarly. I was going to say that thumb drives weren't even invented until 2005-2006, but I looked it up and they were invented in 1999. I guess I forgot that those tiny ones even existed since I was doing all my external storage on DVD-R or CD-RW.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I still have the lanyard to my 128 MB PNY Attaché.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

I think my first one was 512 MB, but I don't have it anymore.