Oh I lived it too. We were still using 1.4 MB floppy disks for school projects in '04. I think the computer class teacher finally started asking people to use flash drives in '06 or '07. I was walking around with a whole two gigs(wow!) in my pocket. I felt like a god. When we went to flash drives, we all started sharing the music we downloaded from Kazaa and Limewire with each other because now the required kit for computer class had the headroom to allow that. Many of us still lugged around CD players if we didn’t have iPods but the flash drives made burning mixes for each other so much easier.
Another kid in a class below me got HEAVY into emulators. So he started telling us how to download ROMs and we’d all be playing Turok and Ocarina and Pokemon on the school computers. Being a teenager in the late 00s was a riot.
Now, my Nintendo Switch has a memory card that’s smaller than my pinky nail, and it holds 200 times the capacity of those chap stick size flash drives. It’s wild. I remember being amazed at the PSP in its day, thinking surely it doesn’t get much better than that. I really appreciate how amazing the Switch and Steam Deck are, even if Tears of the Kingdom makes the poor little guy crap itself.
Anyway, I’ll wrap up this wall of text because it reeks of millennial. But it’s really cool that there’s still support for old tech like this…even if it’s too pricey for someone who isn’t neck deep into it to consider it lol
If I could go back and tell my classmates we’d eventually be able to store 1TB on something the size of a microsd card, they’d say I’d lost my goddamn mind.
The PSP legitimately rocked. It had several great exclusives and a large backlog of compatible PS1 games. I actually ran hacked firmware on mine and dabbled a little into homebrew. Mostly to run (you guessed it) emulators. Given all of the buttons are the same, the PSP is an excellent portable SNES emulator.
That and it blew the graphical capabilities of the DS out of the water. I always thought the touchscreen was a stupid gimmick, but it did allow for some interesting gameplay. But the PSP was just leaps and bounds ahead in terms of power.
I was in college in 2000. They had us use zip disks at first, but it was around that time that USB flash drives started coming out so we quickly transitioned to those. I liked the zip disks, they were definitely cool, but couldnt beat the convenience of a USB drive. Though, they were like 64MB and a bit over a dollar a meg, while a zip disk was like 15-20 bucks for a pack of them.
100 MB portable storage was unreal back then, and then they came out with 250MB.
Apparently you can still buy the media and drives, even a new one:
https://www.amazon.com/Iomega-Zip-100-Portable-Drive/dp/B00000J3Q7
Oh I lived it too. We were still using 1.4 MB floppy disks for school projects in '04. I think the computer class teacher finally started asking people to use flash drives in '06 or '07. I was walking around with a whole two gigs (wow!) in my pocket. I felt like a god. When we went to flash drives, we all started sharing the music we downloaded from Kazaa and Limewire with each other because now the required kit for computer class had the headroom to allow that. Many of us still lugged around CD players if we didn’t have iPods but the flash drives made burning mixes for each other so much easier.
Another kid in a class below me got HEAVY into emulators. So he started telling us how to download ROMs and we’d all be playing Turok and Ocarina and Pokemon on the school computers. Being a teenager in the late 00s was a riot.
Now, my Nintendo Switch has a memory card that’s smaller than my pinky nail, and it holds 200 times the capacity of those chap stick size flash drives. It’s wild. I remember being amazed at the PSP in its day, thinking surely it doesn’t get much better than that. I really appreciate how amazing the Switch and Steam Deck are, even if Tears of the Kingdom makes the poor little guy crap itself.
Anyway, I’ll wrap up this wall of text because it reeks of millennial. But it’s really cool that there’s still support for old tech like this…even if it’s too pricey for someone who isn’t neck deep into it to consider it lol
ah, young piracy, those were the days.
If I could go back and tell my classmates we’d eventually be able to store 1TB on something the size of a microsd card, they’d say I’d lost my goddamn mind.
I’ve been using computers since around 1983 and the PSP was one of the few things that really stood out to me as a huge leap at the time.
Most things are incremental but they really nailed the hardware on that one.
The PSP legitimately rocked. It had several great exclusives and a large backlog of compatible PS1 games. I actually ran hacked firmware on mine and dabbled a little into homebrew. Mostly to run (you guessed it) emulators. Given all of the buttons are the same, the PSP is an excellent portable SNES emulator.
That and it blew the graphical capabilities of the DS out of the water. I always thought the touchscreen was a stupid gimmick, but it did allow for some interesting gameplay. But the PSP was just leaps and bounds ahead in terms of power.
Somewhere I still have my original 1st gen PSP running the OG 1.5 factory firmware.
For emulators.
I was in college in 2000. They had us use zip disks at first, but it was around that time that USB flash drives started coming out so we quickly transitioned to those. I liked the zip disks, they were definitely cool, but couldnt beat the convenience of a USB drive. Though, they were like 64MB and a bit over a dollar a meg, while a zip disk was like 15-20 bucks for a pack of them.