This is Frank Romano for whattheythink.com. Well, consider this an ode to the thumb drive. As with many of you, I travel around to many trade shows and events and in many cases they give you a thumb drive. At press conferences all the material is on the thumb drive as well as in print. If you go to a conference or a meeting sometimes they give you the presentations that way. This is one of the Xerox thumb drives. Actually, I go back long enough to remember that this was one of the original Xerox thumb drives. Of course, they all rotate out so that you can insert it. I only save the ones that are one gigabyte or more although nowadays I like those that are four gigabytes or more.

This is one from Kodak. It’s the same design as the one from Xerox. It’s two gigabytes by the way. EFI follows the same format only theirs is blue. There’s the EFI logo on it. The blue makes it stand out. Of course, the one that stands out the most is the one from AGFA. Now, by the way they don’t use that orange anymore, they use a red. HP, theirs was wood, or fake wood, I guess.

Although I went to one event that was an IT event and they had one of these where you have to physically remove the little cap. I don’t like those because you kind of lose the caps after a while. Somehow I wound up with one from Hilton. I don’t know how that happened. It’s also fake wood, one gigabyte. This was one from an early Heidelberg press conference. I think this was the first one they gave out. This is another one that you have to remove the little cap from it.

They are getting smaller. This is from Press Tech. I opened it up because it is kind of hard to open but when you close it up that’s the size of it. So you say that’s one of the smallest, right? No, no, no. The smallest is now from Xicon. The Xicon one, although it looks like a switchblade here, folds up and it’s that size.

Then, of course, you’ve got the flat ones here. This is from Riso. It folds up inside so you – it looks like a business card. This is from another company, same format for all intents and purposes.
?Then, of course, you can get those that are in the shape of little people. This is from GMC, the people who do a great job with transaction software and social media software. And you have to remove the head of the little guy and then you can use the thumb drive. So it’s a headless thumb drive. By the way, you can dismember the guy, too, by the way. You can take off his arms, his legs and create any kind of creature you wish. And by the way, it’s articulated so you can have him sit, you can have him stand, you can have him do anything you want.

The most interesting and unique one of all is from Copy General in Virginia. Ken Chaletzky sent me this. Now Copy General uses this image of a general. They have a little stuffed toy as a general – I have that somewhere. It’s their logo as well. So Copy General uses a little general. Now what you have to do is you have to remove his pants and then you have the thumb drive. By the way, you can put him back together with the legs going the other way but then it really looks weird.

So you know, after we have now all graduated from floppy disks to CD ROMs and DVDs, I have to say that I really like thumb drives and they save a lot of time and trouble. They’re universal. I can use it on PCs, on Macintoshes. It’s the way I save data. It’s the way I transfer data to some people. So, God bless the thumb drive.

And that’s my opinion.