Terra Extraneus

Interesting article on thumb drives – and software designed for thumb drives – in the May ABA Journal. Attorneys David Beckham and David Hirsch, who work in what they say is a paperless office in Burlington, Iowa, provide a good review of some flash drive applications.

I love my thumb drive. Like many business people, I sit in front of two computers, at work and at home, almost every day. After using numerous other methods over the years to transfer data smoothly from computer to computer, the thumb drive solved that problem for me.

However, I use my thumb drive primarily as a next generation floppy disk or CD – just a means to store and transfer data. Software designed to be resident on and run from thumb drives takes their utility to the next level.

It doesn’t take a crystal ball to foresee a day soon when computers will be just another office appliance, like telephones and printers and fax machines. People will think less in terms of “my computer” and be less concerned with the bells and whistles on their computer, because all of the important stuff – not just files, but many of the applications that run them — will be on one’s portable drive, ready to plug into whatever computer we happen to have access to.