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Terminology

August 18th, 2012 · Posted by Skuds in Technology · No Comments · Technology

A generic USB stick

Quick question: what to you call one of these?

I have captioned it as a USB stick, but they are also called flash drives, pen drives, thumb drives, memory sticks, USB memory cards, and various combinations of those names. How is it that a device can become so ubiquitous so quickly and we can’t even agree on what to call it?

USB stick/memory stick seems to be the most common name, as well as being the most boring. Surely we can do better than that?

These things can be tiny but with more storage than a whole room full of old magnetic mainframe tapes. Even 20 years ago they would have been considered magic and yet we have the most bland, functional name possible for them.

The same with mp3 players – even though you could own one and not have a single mp3 file on it if you prefer Ogg Vorbis, WMA or WAV files. Dammit I want proper space-age names for my space-age devices

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