USB flash drives (AKA thumb drives or USB sticks) have been around for quite a while, and there are untold millions of them in use around the world, so there is nothing unusual about them these days… Intel showed off at a conference in 2013 a prototype of a Thunderbolt thumb drive, using the Mini DisplayPort connector, which was never a shipping product. Then there’s this, a FireWire flash drive! It has only 1 GB capacity, and on it is a custom stripped-down version of Mac OS X 10.4 as well as the Techtool Pro 4 application. It was used by technicians and cluey users to diagnose or check up on the health of their Mac computers. Hilariously, using a daisy-chain of adapters (FireWire 400 to FireWire 800, then FireWire 800 to Thunderbolt 1 / 2, and finally Thunderbolt 1 / 2 to Thunderbolt 3) it will still mount on a current M1 Mac mini. It was donated to me by a friend and now lives amongst the other historical items in the Vault :)

Currently listening: Th' Dudes - “Walking in Light”