Before the USB flash drive the most popular way of moving around data was the floppy disk; CD's and DVD's were other popular methods but required CD and DVD writers which not every machine had. The old floppy disk only held about 1.4 mb, even the earliest USB Flash Drives eclipsed this holding either 8 or 16mb. Today USB Flash Drives which can hold up to 32GB - you can see that things have moved on a long way since their entrance onto the portable storage market.