While on the (off-) topic of magneto-optical drives, do you remember how every cyberpunk film of the 1990s seemed to feature (MO) MiniDiscs as ‘future’ storage? I remember them appearing in some form or another in Strange Days, Johnny Mnemonic, and The Matrix (amongst others). Lawnmower Man featured CD drives in external caddies, a type of drive system that virtually disappeared with the advent of ‘2x” CD-ROM drives starting sometime in 1992 or 1993.

My first USB ‘thumbrive’ was a 16MB IBM-branded unit I received as an amazing gift in December 2001, when the world was still in shock over the 9/11 attacks.

God, the memories...

It didn't hurt that MO drives were big and colourful, which translates well to the screen :)

Anyone for Jaz drives? Oh man, I remember my mom having 100MB Zip drives and 1GB Jaz drives for a while in the 90s. Always wanted an excuse to play around with them but didn't have much useful data to put on them at that point.

I had an internal 2GB Jaz SCSI unit in my April of 1999 dual-PIII-450 “God Box” I was given for my 18th birthday.

Oh man no kidding! Dual P3s... those things were absolute beasts at the time. What video card did you have? I remember the ol 266 celeron to 400 overclock that became popular around then. Researching that was what got me originally into overclocking.